I'm working on a legacy desktop app (~25 years), currently around 600 projects. Maybe one developer per 7 projects. Common workflow is to create custom solutions around your working set of projects, but that's not ideal for whole code analysis/debugging.

Have you guys heard of "libraries"? Having that much source code open at once when I bet 90% rarely needs to be analyzed/parsed is insane.

It always amazes me how someone can say "x sucks" and never question their own insane workflow.

Does that mean that there's a lot of duplicate projects? It seems like there's an opportunity for consolidation. I've seen a few solutions where a developer created a Project for every class library and then only ever referenced them from 1 other Project. I was able to roll up a 30+ project solution into 5.

this seems like a nightmare.

why couldn't you break it out into separate solutions and reference versioned dll's?

We had ~150 projects across about 1M LOC and 4 developers because they were being used like folders - they weren't really separate codebases, just a means of organising the code. We cut that down for a drastic improvement in speed.