<p>Starting new .NET projects always involves a bit of work. You have to create the solution, add projects for different tiers (Domain, DAL, Web, Test), set up references, solution structure, copy javascript files, css templates and master pages etc etc.</p>

<p>What I'd like is <strong>an easy way of cloning any given solution</strong>. </p>

<p>If you use copy/paste, the problem is that you need to then go through renaming namespaces, assembly names, solution names, GUIDs etc. </p>

<p>Is there a way of automating this?</p>

<p>Something like this would be great:</p>

<pre><code>solutionclone.exe --solution=c:\code\abc\template.sln --to=c:\code\xyz --newname=MySolution 
</code></pre>

<p>I'm aware that Visual Studio has project templates, but I've not seen solution templates.</p>

As you already found out: Copy the .sln File and make sure the paths/guids match.
Because the .sln are
```
text/plain
```
just use your favourite scripting language to script a cloner.
Maybe this is a good time to learn Python/Ruby/Perl/
Windows Script Host
MSDN Solution (.sln) File Definition