Every time I open a solution for the first time (we have many TFS branches), I have to wait quite a long time for all the projects to load, old projects to migrate, and the big database projects to deserialize.
This is an agonizing part of the workflow to merge changes across branches in TFS, as I generally only need to load a single project in any given solution, but have to wait for hundreds of extraneous projects to load in every branch. In particular, I have to manually merge file renames in shelfsets because TFPT /unshelve /migrate...
mishandles renames as ADD changes without touching the actual renamed file in the target branch.
Furthermore, my workstation is underpowered and is virtually always on the edge of being out of memory, so having all these giant solutions loaded pushes me into super laggy pagefile.
Unlike this similar question, I am needing a tactic that works by default for new solutions in the future. And this article by Microsoft appears to assume I am familiar writing plugins for Visual Studio, when the task I want seems so simple it sounds like it should be in the built-in preferences. And this plugin was all bugged when I tried it (people are saying it is broken by version 2013 and newer).
I am using VS 2015 Professional, possibly upgrading in the near future to 2018.