Visual Studio - Source control outside solution directory

Question

Originally posted on Software Engineering but was referred back here

I use visual studio at work for creating web sites and to create new features for our third party student information system (SIS). The company that created the SIS also provides tools to generate boilerplate code, and these tools require that the files for the application are in very specific locations.

I'm able to add the C# project that the tool generates to a solution, however I cannot move the project into the solution directory since the tool expects it to be in a certain location that cannot be changed.

Since the project is outside of the solution directory, Visual Studio won't show source control operations for that project.

I was wondering if anyone else has ran into this issue, or a way to enable source control for projects that live outside of the solution directory?

Answer 1

Using a junction was able to solve this issue for me. The projects are hosted on a network drive on a virtual machine in our network, after creating a junction in the solution directory on the virtual machine that points to the source directory, visual studio picked up on the git status and let me commit/push/pull from the solution explorer.

I first tried creating the junction on my local machine, which for obvious reasons after reading more about junctions, did not work. Make sure to create the junction on the machine where the physical drive resides.