Professional Visual Studio® 2008

6.1. Solution Structure

Whenever you're working within Visual Studio, you will have a solution open. When you're editing an ad hoc file, this will be a temporary solution that you can elect to discard when you have completed your work. However, the solution enables you to manage the files that you're currently working with, so in most cases saving the solution means that you can return to what you were doing at a later date without having to locate and reopen the files on which you were working.

Solutions should be thought of as containers of related projects. The projects within a solution do not need to be of the same language or project type. For example, a single solution could contain an ASP.NET web application written in Visual Basic, a C# control library, and an IronRuby WPF application. The solution enables you to open all these projects together in the IDE and manage the build and deployment configuration for them as a whole.

The most common way to structure applications written within Visual Studio is to have a single solution containing a number of projects. Each project can then be made up of a series of both code files and folders. The main window in which you work with solutions and projects is the Solution Explorer, shown in Figure 6-1.

Figure 6.1. Figure 6-1

Within a project, folders are used to organize the source code, and have no application meaning associated ...