Copying a Solution folder and renaming all files and subfolders

Question

I have a Solution X. In windows explorer this is the solution folder:

I want to keep X as it is but use all its functionality (and winforms) in a new Solution Y. I copied the whole solution folder ao X and renamed the folder Y. In VS I used the solution explorer and renamed the solution to Y and also renamed the project to Y.

So in the Solution Explorer it looks like the following:

And in Windows explorer I've now got:

You can see from the above that there are still Xs. If I manually rename these files/folders in windows explorer then, when opening the solution in VS it complains about not being able to find certain files.

Is the above a bad practise to be avoided?

Or is there an easy way to ensure renaming washes through all the files/folders in the solution folder without confusing VS?

Answer 1

This isn't something I'd recommend doing, generally.

If you really need to then I'd suggest that you copy the solution, open it in Visual Studio, and rename the folders through the Solution Explorer. This way, the solution file is updated with the new folder names and you won't see those errors.