When executing
mSBuildWorkspace.TryApplyChanges(solution);
Visual Studio changes the solution in place. This means that if I want to output to a different location, I need to first copy the whole solution to the requested target and only then work on it. This is error prone as the solution might have relative path links to dependencies, which can break when moving the solution.
So is there a way to tell MSBuildWorkspace to output the changes to a different folder than the source?
There's no built-in support for this.
Option #1: Instead of instead of calling TryApplyChanges you could call Solution.GetChanges to figure out what changed compared to what was originally loaded, and then call the various methods to get the changed documents and apply the edit yourself. This means you're on the hook to actually apply the edits -- source file edits are easy (just write the updated text) but if you care about more complicated things like project changes (adding/removing references) you don't really have a way to leverage MSBuildWorkspace's support for those sorts of things.
Option #2: Roslyn's open source, so you'd have to modify MSBuildWorkspace yourself to allow such a redirection, which would let you potentially try to reuse some of the more complicated logic around project manipulation. Or you can just copy/paste the implementation of the applying, and then use Solution.GetChanges and the reused code.
