A dotnet tool to manage multiple Visual Studio startup projects for a solution.

This tool can be installed globally:

dotnet tool install startup-projects --global

Or locally:

dotnet new tool-manifest
dotnet tool install startup-projects

Only projects with a <IsDefaultMultiStartupProject> property set to true will be included in the multiple startup configuration. Since this tool doesn't use MSBuild to load the project files the property can not be set in Directory.Build.props, it must be in the project file itself.

Running this will either create a new .suo file for the solution, or overwrite the existing one. This means any settings saved in your existing .suo file will be lost. You will be prompted to confirm this before the file is overwritten.

List the startup projects for the current solution.

This command has no options.

Set the startup projects for the current solution.

Note: The supported Visual Studio versions are 2019 and 2022

List all projects configured to be startup projects:

dotnet startup-projects list

Set the startup projects for the current solution:

dotnet startup-projects set -v 2019 -y

It may be helpful to add a script for this to your global.json to make it easier to run:

{
  "scripts": {
    "startup": "dotnet startup-projects --vs 2022 --yes"
  }
}

Note: This requires run-script to be used in the project.

This tool supports the DOTNET_SYSTEM_CONSOLE_ALLOW_ANSI_COLOR_REDIRECTION environment variable. Setting this to 1 or true will force color output on all platforms. Due to a limitation of the Console apis this will not work on Windows when output is redirected.

There is also support for the NO_COLOR environment variable. Setting this to any value will disable color output.