Modifying Visual Studio solution and project files with PowerShell - visual-studio-2010

Question

We are currently reorganizing our source code, moving stuff around in a new directory
structure. This impacts our Visual Studio solution and project files, where things like assembly references, possibly output directories, pre and post build events, and so on ... must be updated to reflect our changes.
Since we have many solutions and projects, my hope was to partly automate the process using PowerShell, with something like a PowerShell "provider" for VS:
In an ideal world, I would be able to do something like:
$MySolution.Projects["MyProject"].PostBuildEvent = "copy <this> to <that>"
I know about PowerConsole (which I haven't fully explored yet) for scripting Visual Studio. However, the documentation is scarce and I'm not sure it really covers my needs.
Anything else for easily manipulating solution and project files? Preferably in PowerShell, but I'm open to other suggestions.

Answer 1

In my experience, the easiest way to manipulate Visual Studio solutions using PowerShell (from within or outside of Visual Studio) is to load the project file as XML and use PowerShell to manipulate it.
$proj = [xml](get-content Path\To\MyProject.csproj)
$proj.GetElementsByTagName("PostBuildEvent") | foreach {
$_."#text" = 'echo "Hello, World!"'
}
$proj.Save("Path\To\MyProject.csproj")
If you're running your script in the NuGet Package Manager Console, you can get the paths to all of the project files like so:
PM> get-project -all | select -expand FileName
C:\Users\Me\Documents\Visual Studio 10\Projects\MyProject\MyProject.csproj
C:\Users\Me\Documents\Visual Studio 10\Projects\MyProject\MyProjectTests.csproj
PM>

Answer 2

Editing solution files from PowerShell is very picky about the characters you use in whitespace, making it a pain to automate with text replacements.
If you're editing VS Solution files with PowerShell, there's a good chance you've also got access to the dotnet CLI. I recommend invoking the dotnet CLI from PowerShell instead and using the built-in sln command:
Usage example:
# Create a solution, a console app, and two class libraries.
dotnet new sln -n mysolution
dotnet new console -o myapp
dotnet new classlib -o mylib1
dotnet new classlib -o mylib2
# Add the projects to the solution
# Use --solution-folder to organize the class libraries into a solution folder.
dotnet sln mysolution.sln add myapp\myapp.csproj
dotnet sln mysolution.sln add mylib1\mylib1.csproj --solution-folder mylibs
dotnet sln mysolution.sln add mylib2\mylib2.csproj --solution-folder mylibs
When invoked from PowerShell, you can even use Glob patterns:
dotnet sln todo.sln add (ls -r **/*.csproj)
Docs & examples:
https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/dotnet/core/tools/dotnet-sln