How best to query all the files in a project/solution?

[mrlacey]

I have a few extensions that need to know about every file in the solution.
The SDK options for querying all the files in a solution are really slow, so I query the file system directly.
This is much faster (is acceptable) but has three potential issues:

• It can't handle files in the solution that are outside the root directory of the solution.
• It can't account for files that are in the filesystem but not part of the solution.
• It can't handle code spaces, live share, and other remote file systems that are coming with VS17.

Is there a better way?
How do other people handle this scenario?
Could the toolkit provide something to help here?

[reduckted]

The SDK options for querying all the files in a solution are really slow

What technique are you currently using?

The IVSHierarchy model is all COM-style APIs and is pretty horrible to use. Perhaps some wrapper classes for that would help?

[mrlacey]

I don't have the original code anymore, but was getting the Solution object, then for each Project (in Solution.Projects) I'd iterate through the ProjectItems in the project.
Having to allow for the different project types, recursion, and solution folder variants would be good in a helper wrapper class but even when I did this I still found it slow for large projects/solutions. I think a key part of the performance issue was that accessing some of the underlying types needs to be done on the UI/main thread and so the delay was significant.
In contrast, it's easy to get the directory the solution file is in and then search for files with a specific extension, and then use a FileSystemWatcher to pick up changes.

As a separate issue/feature a wrapper for accessing all projects in a solution could be a useful addition here (I have other extensions where I do this) but my bigger interest is iterating through all the files in a project/solution.

[StevenRasmussen]

I don't have much to add here other than, "yeah... this is really painful". I'm essentially doing as @mrlacey laid out by iterating over all the projects and their items in a solution. I haven't tried using the IVSHierarchy approach. Do you know if it's more performant than using the DTE objects? If so, I could look at writing some wrappers/extension methods and contributing them to the project.