| Solutions and projects are the primary vehicles within Visual Studio for organizing and managing your code. They allow you to divide and conquer large solutions, and they provide a single point of access for various settings (at both the solution and project level). Solutions are the top-level container, and the first work item that Visual Studio creates when creating a new code project. To summarize what we have learned about solutions: Solutions can be built (triggering a build of each of its projects) but cannot be compiled. Visual Studio can load only one solution at a time; to work on multiple solutions concurrently, you must have multiple copies of Visual Studio running. You can create folders within a solution to help group its content; these folders are virtual and do not represent physical file folders. Solutions are primarily used to group one or more projects together. Projects within a solution can be a mix of the various supported languages and project types. Solutions cannot contain other solutions. Besides projects, solutions can also contain miscellaneous files (called solution items) that typically represent information pertinent to the solution (readme files, system diagrams, and the like).
Although solutions are an important and necessary implement, it is the Visual Studio project that actually results in a compiled .NET component. Projects are created and based on templates available within the IDE that cover the various development scenarios, ranging from web application development to windows application development to smart device development. To summarize what we have learned about projects: Projects exist to compile code into assemblies. Projects are based on a project template; project templates define the various artifacts, references, and so on that make sense for the project's context. Like solutions, projects also support subfolders to help you better organize your code. These folders are actual, physical folders that are created on disk. Projects contain project items. They can be source code files, references, and other items such as virtual folders and database connections.
We have seen how solutions and projects are physically manifested; in the next chapter we will cover the primary Visual Studio tools used to interact with solutions and projects. |
