- Don't.
-
Close Visual Studio and don't open it again until I tell you. Visual Studio is not competent at renaming things.
-
Assuming you're using git, clean the working folder to remove anything that's not in version control (this will help the search-and-replace step because it won't have to go through a bunch of generated files)
git clean -fdx
-
Rename the solution file (
.sln
), the project folders, and the project files (.csproj
,.fsproj
) -
Open the project folder in any good text editor.
-
Search-and-replace across the whole folder and replace and text occurrences of the old name with the new name. Sublime Text and Atom have a tree view where you can right click -> Search in folder. Notepad++ has a "Find in files" option.
-
Hunt around for any weirdly mis-spelt versions of the old name that may not have been caught by the search-and-replace.
-
Specifically, look for a package.nuspec (Nuget package manifest) and check the package name in there. It should probably be the same as the solution.
-
(Finally) Open VS again and see if the project loads.
-
See if it builds.
-
Commit and push everything.
-
Don't forget to update any corresponding servcies and integrations, such as:
- Github repositories
- Continuous Integration configs
ModernRonin has written an automated tool for doing this - give it a go before trying the manual steps here, and let us know how it goes!