[stinos]

The solution to the messiness would be to use an MSBuild project file instead of a solution file.

Read somewhere this is definitely on the dev team's list, but cannot find it anymore. When building a solution it is first converted to an msbuild file which is then built. So all that is left is to add VS gui support for such files to treat them as project containers, and then it's byebye sln.

[MrZipf]

That's good news. I left MSFT last year and know some of the internal build toolsets have their own similar solution, but it's not integrated with Visual Studio.