Chromium is an extreme case of this. When we started we wanted to live the VS way of life (IDE tools and the like), so we had a Chrome.sln and various projects. Eventually it became too much. It would take minutes to load the sln, and woe to you if you synced your source tree while msvs was open, as you'd receive a neverending slew of modal prompts asking you to reload each of hundreds of projects. I think we still have a msvs build, but most developers use ninja on Windows, and just use msvs for debugging. The sad fact is that addons like Visual Assist X provide many of the benefits of the IDE without requiring projects to be loaded.
How many projects does chromium have? I typically work in a solution w/ about 175 projects and it only takes about 10 seconds to load up for me on 2012.
It's a single product, composed of multiple projects/targets building different dlls/executables. That was my understanding of the point of a "solution" (vs the old days of VC6 when there were only projects and workspaces). Anyway, it used to work back in the days when most of Chrome's code came from WebKit. Now we're many times bigger. It's clear MSVS' project UI is not intended for building projects of this scale. I'm assuming Microsoft doesn't use this UI to develop windows, or office, so it's not surprising this case isn't supported.
I have no idea what the Windows or Office people do, but the Visual Studio group certainly does build their own software in VS. (Or did as of mid 2009 when I quit, anyway.) It was not a particularly pleasant experience!
