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So the consensus is that reducing the number of projects in a Visual Studio solution can greatly decrease compilation time, which is clearly a good thing.

We've done this with a big solution, but are running into hygiene issues where the IDE will allow circular dependencies between different logical layers of code because these layers are now stored in separate folders of the same project rather than in separate projects, where one would have to add an explicit reference to the other.

Clearly, the onus is on the developer to understand the code organization well enough not to do this, but I'd like to have my cake and eat it too.

Is there a VS plugin that will allow me to define folders as if they were projects in this regard, so references could be managed at the folder level, to prevent these kind of dependency issues before the fact?

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I do not know about AddIn for Visual Studio. But NDepend analysis tool could help. It provides information about circular dependencies between namespaces.

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Yeah, our current thought is to have a series of NDepend queries to identify these issues, but I was hoping for something in the IDe that could take care of this before the fact. –  charoco Dec 9 '09 at 19:38

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