New Solution File Format

Not all heroes wear capes. I mean, bunch of them cannot be bothered to wear pants. But all heroes should at least get a beer. And none more than those that finally took the darn .sln format behind the barn.

Yep, without much fanfare, a new solution file format was introduced. Instead of big ugly sln file everybody was used to but nobody ever loved, we got much simpler slnx file. In just a few lines new format pretty much does the only thing you need it to - list darn projects.

Gone are GUIDs, gone are Debug and Release profiles, and finally, gone is darn BOM with an empty starting line. Essentially everything is gone except for what you actually need. And yes, you can still have debug and release profiles - you just don’t need to explicitly define them in the solution file.

Migration is as easy as it gets:

dotnet sln <solution.sln> migrate
rm <solution.sln>

Looking at the whole .NET ecosystem, this feature is small. In general, I think this syntactic sugar category often gets overlooked. If it’s good, you will actually probably forgot all about how things were before. I hope that, in a few years time, sln will be just a distant memory and a way to scare children into eating their broccoli.