Add multi solutions support

[fabrice-bauer]

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Is your feature request related to a problem? Please describe the problem.

Hello,

I am trying to use Aspire using 4 existing solutions. Each of these solutions contain between 10+ and 60+ projects.

I managed to create an Aspire host project referencing the 4 "main" projects of each solution and this works very well.
However when using the Aspire solution not all projects are there and therefore it is not possible to easily navigate code or rebuild everything.
I could manually add all existing projects into the Aspire solution but with the high number of projects this would be quite long plus it would require maintenance when we add new projects in the existing 4 solutions.

Describe the solution you'd like

I am not fully sure if this should be managed by Aspire or Visual Studio but in this scenario being able to reference solutions from a solution could greatly help.

Thanks very much.

Additional context

No response

[FAYSALAHAMMAD2004]

Hi there

[joperezr]

Hello @fabrice-bauer, thanks for your submission. Out of curiosity, is there a reason why you can't just have everything in a single solution? What people do in similar situations, is to have a single .sln file that has all of the projects, and then have multiple solution filter files .slnf which can enable people that just want to open a subset of projects to be able to do so. You can find more information on solution filters here, but the TL;DR is that they are very small files that just point to a solution, and apply some filters to it so that when you open that file (The .slnf file) with Visual Studio, it looks like if it were a different solution as it only has a subset of projects.

Doing this would allow you to continue working on a subset of projects when needed, but also allow you to fully orchestrate the projects with Aspire when you need to run everything, rebuild and debug.

[fabrice-bauer]

Hello @joperezr, in fact I forgot to mention an important aspect which is that each solution and corresponding set of projects are in 4 separate repos.
But thinking about it again, this is probably not an Aspire related improvement but rather a Visual Studio one.
I will also have a look at the new slnx format which might make it much easier to "replicate" the existing solutions content into the new one.
Thanks very much.

[Mrxx99]

@fabrice-bauer have you seen https://github.com/Dutchskull/Aspire.PolyRepo ?

[fabrice-bauer]

Thanks @Mrxx99 I had not seen it, it can be very interesting, too, but it addresses the multi repo part.
For the solution with all projects of all existing solutions to be able to rebuild and debug the whole distributed app from the single Aspire Host, it seems the new slnx format makes it much easier to maintain a new dedicated solution, so I will try it.