Once upon a time there was this excellent extension for Visual Studio, SolutionStartPage, which would let you replace the start page with a customizable overview of your solutions. And it was very convenient. You can find sources for the project in its own GitHub repository.
And then came Visual Studio 2019, which replaced the start page with a start window, entirely breaking SolutionStartPage (see issue #25). There were a few discussions about the start page on Visual Studio developer community (see here) but Microsoft never really brought it back.
Visual Studio now proposes different ways to manage recent and frequently used solutions, but none that really pleases me. So... this is SolutionBook, a solution management extension for Visual Studio 2019+. It installs a new tool window, which can then be displayed with View | Other Windows | SolutionBook and docked anywhere. I like to dock it to the left, with the already existing Toolbox tool window.
It exposes a treeview of solutions, which can be organized and grouped into folders.
It automatically saves its structure (to %USERPROFILE%\AppData\Roaming\SolutionBook.settings) when needed, and also updates itself whenever that file changes,
in a way that should guarantee safe concurrent usage between multiple instances of Visual Studio.
The extension is available through the Visual Studio Marketplace and can be installed in Visual Studio via the EXTENSIONS | Manage Extensions menu. Search for "SolutionBook" in online extensions.
This was all quickly put together, and then hacked and hacked again. WPF is hard. I am not especially proud of the code. There may be issues. It works on my machine and I use it everyday. Feel free to comment, suggest, propose changes, etc.