I am hoping some of you can offer some thoughts on this-- I am trying to list reasons to use Visual Studio project files instead of Visual Studio solution files to build projects (e.g. CCNet --> MSBuild task --> .csproj instead of CCNet --> MSBuild task -- > .sln). I am of the thinking that ideally it is **generally** best to build using project files instead solution files.
Reasons to use project files and NOT use solution files: 1. A .sln file could be modified by a developer for, let's say, debugging purposes, and that could cause the build process to fail 2. Solution files can use paths that do not work with the build process 3. Using solution files goes against having small, more granular builds because this would require that a whole solution is retrieved from the repository 4. Automated unit tests cannot (or at least easily) be executed upon each project build, but would rather have to be done after the whole solution builds Reasons to NOT use project files and instead use solution files: 1. Requires more work to setup the builds 2. using project files can require having to contend with false positives when a changeset covers many projects within the solution and a build cycle detects and starts building projects out of "order" (this can be resolved by always building a whole queue from the beginning, upon a detected change, of course).
