Until better Visual Studio support is available along the trunk, what is the best way to create/maintain Visual Studio solution and project files? In particular, how should I deal with project references for dependencies outside of the solution? Should I configure the dependency:copy-dependencies goal to drop all of the dependencies for each child module in a given location within each child module? What interim solutions are others here using?
I am assuming I will often reference dependencies which have been assigned a final name without a version number. I'm not sure this will be relevant to the approach used, but it may. Background Assumptions/Understanding: As far as I know the nmaven trunk does not yet contain a maven plugin to spin up Visual Studio project and solution files. Furthermore there is no Visual Studio plugin available on the trunk. I realize this is simply because they are yet to be ported from the 0.14 branch. In a typical java project the IDE files reference jars in the local maven cache. Since the dependency references in Java IDE files are typically spun by maven (eclipse:eclipse, idea:idea, etc.) or managed by maven support within the IDE this is quite reasonable. If one had to maintain all of these references manually doing so would quickly become unreasonable.
