Introducing Elephant Projects - Cross-repository refactoring

At work, we maintain a product with 400+ projects spread over 15 repositories. Making changes across them is painful—especially when debugging SDK-level code and publishing local packages repeatedly.

To make this smoother, I created a tool: ElephantProject (also on NuGet).

ElephantProject swaps NuGet <PackageReference>s with <ProjectReference>s, and generates solution files for local dev.

These changes are never committed—this is for local development only.

Use Case – Refactoring

In my local dev directory (called “Work”), I clone all the repositories. Then I run:

elephant-project rewrite -d Work

This scans all .csproj files and replaces package references with project references, matching by PackageId or AssemblyName. I can then build locally without republishing anything.

To create a solution file:

elephant-project sln -d Work MySolution.sln -i MyApp/**

It includes all app projects and their dependencies.

I typically maintain:

elephant-project sln -d Work Full.sln

elephant-project sln -d Work App.sln -i MyApp/**

elephant-project sln -d Work AppAndSdk.sln -i MyApp/** -i MySdk/**

Use Case – Syncing Solution Files

In many repos, we have multiple applications. Each app has its own .sln, plus a repo-wide one. Solution files fall out of sync easily.

With ElephantProject, I automate syncing:

# Create root-level sln
elephant-project sln Root.sln -i Applications/**

# Create one per app
for app in Applications/*; do
  elephant-project sln "$app/$app.sln" -i "$app/**"
done

All .sln files stay up to date—without manual tweaks.

This tool has massively simplified multi-repo dev and SDK testing for us.