tl;dr

This is a small command line utility for saving and restoring Visual Studio

• document window layouts,
• debugger breakpoints and
• bookmarks

across different Git branches.

The Problem

Visual Studio saves all its user-specific settings for a solution in a .suo file. Due to that user-specific nature, it makes no sense to put the .suo file in version control. This means that things like open documents, breakpoints and bookmarks always stay the same when going back and forth between branches, leading to a (for me) annoying behavior:

• You work on a new feature in branch A. You have added new code files here and arranged your code tabs and windows in a way that is suitable for what you need to do.
• An issue pops up that needs to be fixed immediately. You checkout branch B from the main branch and get to work. Visual Studio tries to apply the previous document window layout, but the new files you added in branch A do not exist in branch B, so those tabs and windows can't be opened. The files that you had open which exist in this branch as well will be opened, but chances are you don't need those, so you'll either close or leave them, and open other files that are involved in the fix you need to make.
• You finish the fix in branch B and get back to branch A. The document settings stored in the .suo file are now those from your work in branch B - although your new branch A files are now present again, Visual Studio doesn't remember you had them open, and instead presents you with the files from your branch B fix that are not relevant to your work in branch A. You need to close those and then find your new branch A files again and restore your working layout by hand.

The Sol.... Crutch

This is a small command line tool that can do one of two things:

• Extract the document window layout, breakpoints and bookmarks from a .suo file and remember them for the current Git branch
• Overwrite the document window layout, breakpoints and bookmarks in the .suo files for supported Visual Studio versions with those previously stored for the current branch

If amagatsha.exe is in $PATH, the workflow is as follows:

• If you need to switch branches, close the solution; this is necessary to make Visual Studio save the current solution settings to the .suo file.

• Run amagatsha save in the repository's root directory. This will look for any .sln files in the directory, try to find the respective .suo files and add or update the entry with the current branch's name in <solutionname>.branchdocuments. If .suo files for more than one supported Visual Studio version (currently 2015 and 2017) are found, settings are backed up from the most recently changed one.

• Checkout the other branch.

• Run amagatsha restore. This will look for an entry with the current branch name in the .branchdocuments file, and if found, will replace the solution settings in the .suo file with that data. If .suo files for more than one supported Visual Studio version (currently 2015 and 2017) are found, settings are restored into all of them.

• Reopen the solution.

• amagatsha cleanup -b removes solution settings for branches that do not exist in the local repository (the -b parameter is optional)

• amagatsha cleanup -d <n> removes solution settings for branches that have not been updated in <n> days.

This is probably too cumbersome for most people to use but helps me in the short term. A much nicer solution would be a Visual Studio extension that takes care of this, but that would obviously be a lot more effort, and I don't know how feasible that really would be.

Limitations

This currently only works when calling amagatsha.exe from the directory that contains the .sln file. (It does not have to be located there.)

Building

Clone the repository and run build.cmd or build the solution in Visual Studio.

If you just want to use the application, download the zip file from the Releases section.

Amawhat?

Amagatsha is Zulu for "branches".