Chapter 2: Project Management in Visual Studio 2005

Nearly everything you do in Microsoft® Visual Studio® 2005 revolves around solutions and projects. In this chapter, we'll talk about solutions and projects in detail and give you a good understanding of what those terms really mean. We'll also describe project management in Visual Studio 2005 and explain how you can organize your software projects to maximize the features of the integrated development environment (IDE).

Overview of Solutions and Projects

Managing complex software projects can be a difficult and messy affair. Visual Studio 2005 helps by organizing programming projects as solutions (groups of projects) and projects and by handling references to assemblies and to components outside this structure. This organization and reference feature helps promote code reuse by allowing you to take advantage of related projects, existing assemblies, COM components, and source code. The easiest way to reuse Microsoft .NET code is through references to assemblies in your projects and solutions.

Important Visual Studio 2005 organizes software projects on two conceptual levels. Solutions contain projects and solution items. Projects contain the source files that are compiled into executables and assemblies.

The most important tool for project management in Visual Studio 2005 is Solution Explorer (Ctrl+Alt+L), shown in Figure 2-1. Solution Explorer uses a tree-view window to provide access to all the projects and files that are part of the currently open solution. Visual Studio 2005 can host one solution at a time, but you can run multiple instances of Visual Studio if you want to work with multiple solutions concurrently.

Figure 2-1: Solutions act as containers for projects and solution items.

Most new projects in Visual Studio 2005 are created using a template developed by a language integrator. For example, Visual Studio 2005 ships with support for Microsoft Visual Basic®, Visual C#®, Visual J#®, and Visual C++®. Each of these languages features a number of project types that programmers can choose from when creating a new project. A new project is created as part of a new solution by default. You can also add projects to existing solutions.

For Windows Forms applications and unmanaged Microsoft Windows®–based applications, the solution file for a project is by default stored in the same folder as the project. For Web applications, solution files are typically stored in a folder in the Visual Studio Projects folder in your My Documents folder and point to the Web server that's hosting the application.

A single project can be a member of many different solutions. Because it's so easy to reorganize your projects in Visual Studio 2005, you should feel free to create your initial projects with default solutions. Later on, you can move your projects around and add them to new solutions if you want.