In recent years, I started dabbling in ruby, node.js, electron, etc. As time passed, I (somehow) forgot the notion of a “solution” file. I know that sounds exaggerated or cra-cra coming from me, but hold on. I’ll explain. To open an electron application (e.g. your moment of GitHub Zen app) in a non-VS editor like Atom, you’d simply `cd` into the root folder of where you cloned your repo and type in `atom .` The dot in the `atom .` means open all the files listed here.

View solution-less repo in Atom

And there in atom, you’ll see a similar experience to Solution Explorer, but instead of a solution file at the top, you see the root folder.

View solution-less repo in Visual Studio 2015

Now let’s say you connect to the your-moment-of-GitHub-zen repo via Team Explorer in Visual Studio 2015. But oh-no! Your solution explorer will be empty. After spending a year using Atom, it’s really odd feeling when none of your files appear available in your editor. (See! I told ya’ll I could justify forgetting about a solution file!)

You might hope that Team Explorer will have some sort of solution available… (boom! did you see what I did there with that play on words re having a solution for not having a solution? thank you! I’m here all week…)

The workaround is to manually File – Open – File your files and use Team Explorer to manage your changes (or command line – I guess you can’t have too many options).

View solution-less repo in Visual Studio 2017

Hello Visual Studio 2017! What do we have here??

Let’s see what this Show Folder View button does…

And there we go! You can now open a project in Visual Studio without requiring a solution. I’ve spent all of 2 minutes playing with this new feature, so I’ll have to learn where to go from here!