Can I rename a C# symbol from the command line?

Question

Visual Studio has a "Refactor Rename" feature where I can right-click any type or member and rename it, and it will update all references within a project or solution to match. Is this functionality accessible from MSBuild command line tools, without having to open Visual Studio?

(I'm doing this because I have a project that is so large that Visual Studio runs out of memory while attempting to calculate where the rename is needed).

Answer 1

As far as I'm aware that's not something that's available outside of Visual Studio; although you probably have a couple of avenues available for getting it done.

The first thing that I'd try is using a lighter editor, VSCode, Atom, etc. Something that uses less memory, but will still hopefully let you get the rename done. You might have to use a regex find/replace to get it done; whether that's an option kind of comes down to if you can make an accurate regex.

If you can actually get the project open in VS with no (or less, at least) problems, then you could also start unloading projects that aren't relevant to the rename. If you know that it's only available in certain projects then unload everything else, perform your rename, and reload the projects. If it's everywhere then you might still be able to do something similar to this, perform the rename in a few projects, unload them, load the next few, rename, etc. Although I'm honestly not 100% sure that'll work, I've never attempted it.

Regardless of what you try, if you haven't already be sure to have your code in source control just in case. I'm sure this is doable, but maybe not via the VS command line.

Answer 2

No. There is no shipping msbuild target, task or tool to rename variables from the command line.

You could of course write yourself. :)

But I highly suggest using Visual Studio Code as an alternative to Visual Studio for loading large numbers of projects. It's an outstanding cross platform IDE. And who knows, perhaps someone wrote a plugin for it to rename variables...??