Disabling Visual Studio Popups

Question

I have a big project that I have to download and work on. There is nothing I can do about it - just download the solution and all its projects.

The problem is that the first few minutes, VS loads the project one by one, and it constantly informs me about it, constantly displaying the window "Loading the project is required ...". Of course, I know that this is necessary, but is it impossible to do this in the background? I would be happy if I could just open a text editor and configure configs or read the documentation without pop-ups stealing focus.

This happens during the whole regeneration of the project (we use GYP) - since the VS-solution and projects are generated every time I have to work on the new C ++ / flags / dependencies settings, I have to sit and watch VS, sending out these small windows.

It has one more drawback - if, right after the project is regenerated, I try to build it, then VS will “block” - he will complain that he will not be able to close the project when assembling, and I need to complete the assembly in order to “close” the project. I understand that what it really does is closing and opening again to update the settings ... but a popup that blocks the entire IDE makes it more annoying.

I know that I can turn off automatic reloading of the original file when it was edited outside, for example. Sublime text. Are there any solutions that would allow me to do the same for projects? Some settings, plugins or registry entries that would prevent these windows from spamming or that could reload the project when it suits me? This is very annoying when I have to switch to ST every time I regenerate and create projects, because Visual Studio will remain locked until the build is complete.

Answer 1

I have a similar problem with CMake-generated Visual Studio solutions. Although I don't have a solution, I found a workaround that works great for me - close this solution before restarting the generator and open it again when you finish the restart. With normal keyboard mappings, Alt + F T closes, and Alt + F J 1 opens again.

Answer 2

To disable Intellisense, Visual Studio usually takes a lot of time while analyzing project loading headers and creating its intellisense database. Turn it off and see if the load time improves.

It may not be applicable if you cannot change your mind, but I would try to move less important modules / projects to DLLs or ready-made libraries. The candidates for this are third-party / external libraries that you do not plan to modify or potentially really stable sections of your code base.

Good luck.

Answer 3

The VS system records the latest solution associated with each project in .SUO files. If you delete .SUO files, you can open the project files separately, and then save the solution containing only the projects that you want to open.