Find all references doesn't locate member references in other .NET projects of differing language

Question

I have a VS 2013 solution with one VB.NET ASP.NET project which references several c# class library projects (not DLLs) within the same solution. I made lots of changes to logic within some of the method overloads in one of the c# projects. Since the VB.NET project uses these overloads extensively, I want to see how many places these methods are referenced. I go to the c# project that contains the changes, right-click the overload I want, and select Find All References, but it only shows me the references in the c# projects. However, when I go to one of those methods in the VB.NET project, it finds all the references within the VB.NET project as well as the method declarations in the c# project.

I could do a solution-wide text search for the method name, but this method name is used multiple times because it's overloaded. Therefore, I want to search for a particular overloaded method signature, not the method name.

Is this a known shortcoming of VS 2013? Something else I've also noticed that I've noticed is that selecting Go To Reference from within a VB.NET project on a method that's declared in a c# project will take you to the object browser rather than directly to the method definition in the source project itself.

Answer 1

This is an old problem, there are many bug feedback reports for it on Microsoft's feedback site. The canonical one is probably this one. Quoting Dustin Campbell's response:

The general problem is that C# and Visual Basic do not share any common infrastructure with regard to the symbol tables that are used for features like Find All References, Go to Definition or Rename. So, such features don't work between multiple languages. That said, we are looking at ways to change this in the future, but the work required is very substantial.

Annotating a bit, the C# and VB.NET IDEs look similar at the surface but they are very different under the hood. Part of that is them being supported by distinct groups within Microsoft, a survival strategy for any software company, big groups don't work. But above all history plays a strong role in this, Visual Basic had strong IDE support for a very long time. They did not throw away that work when they moved to VB.NET, not in the least because they had to support all previous IDE features so not to alienate their existing customer base. The C# team got a fresh start without that baggage, they started from scratch. Inevitably the internals between them, like the IntelliSense symbol tables, are drastically different.

Tackling the "common infrastructure" problem was not forgotten, the Roslyn project was the instrumental step. It took a very long time to get finished but it is ready to go today. Integrated into VS2015. Whether it actually solves this problem is something I don't know yet, I will in a couple of months. Maybe somebody that has the RC version can confirm. They did create two versions of Roslyn, one for C# and another for VB.NET. Uh-oh.