Professional Visual Studio 2012

Chapter 6

Solutions, Projects, and Items

WHAT’S IN THIS CHAPTER?

• Creating and configuring solutions and projects
• Controlling how an application is compiled, debugged, and deployed
• Configuring the many project-related properties
• Including resources and settings with an application
• Enforcing good coding practices with the Code Analysis Tools
• Modifying the configuration, packaging, and deployment options for web applications

Other than the simplest applications, such as Hello World, most applications require more than one source file. This raises a number of issues, such as how the files will be named, where they will be located, and whether they can be reused. Within Visual Studio 2012, the concept of a solution, containing a series of projects, made up of a series of items, is used to enable developers to track, manage, and work with their source files. The IDE has a number of built-in features that aim to simplify this process, while still allowing developers to get the most out of their applications. This chapter examines the structure of solutions and projects, looking at available project types and how they can be configured.

SOLUTION STRUCTURE

Whenever you work within Visual Studio, you have a solution open. When you edit an ad hoc file, this is a temporary solution that you can elect to discard when you complete 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 ...