Professional Visual Studio® 2008

6.4. Project Types

Within Visual Studio, the most common projects for Visual Basic and C# have been broadly classified into six categories. With the exception of Web Site Projects, which are discussed separately later in this chapter, each project contains a project file (.vbproj or .csproj) that conforms to the MSBuild schema. Selecting a project template will create a new project of a specific project type and populate it with initial classes and settings. Following are the six most common project types:

• Windows: The Windows project category is the broadest and includes most of the common project types that run on end-user operating systems. This includes the Windows Forms executable projects, Console application projects, and Windows Presentation Foundation (WPF) applications. These project types create an executable (.exe) assembly that is executed directly by an end user. The Windows category also includes several types of library assemblies that can easily be referenced by other projects. These include both class libraries and control libraries for Windows Forms and WPF applications. A class library reuses the familiar .dll extension. The Windows Service project type can also be found in this category.

• Office: As its name suggests, the Office category creates managed code add-ins for Microsoft office products such as Outlook, Word, and Excel. These project types use Visual Studio Tools for Office (VSTO), and are capable of creating add-ins for most products in both the Office ...