Visual Studio® 2010 All-in-One For Dummies®

Chapter 1. Building Solutions and Projects

In This Chapter

• Understanding the build process

• Creating build configurations

• Viewing build feedback

• Automating daily builds

An application comprises many pieces — presentation code, data-access libraries, unit tests, configuration files, installation programs, and more. Visual Studio organizes these pieces into projects, and the entire application is a solution.

While you're creating the interfaces and writing the data access code for your solution, you need to stop periodically and test your application. To test your application, you need to run a compiler that converts the human-readable source code in your projects to machine-readable binary files. Visual Studio provides a set of build commands that you use to compile your projects and solutions.

By its nature, the build process is tightly coupled with deployment. In the simplest deployment case, you create a release build and distribute the output files. However, very rarely is real life so simple. Some types of applications — such as multiple-tier Windows applications, ASP.NET Web sites, and mobile applications — are inherently more difficult to deploy. You need to take many variables into consideration when creating release builds.

This chapter shows you how to build your solutions and projects for use on a local development computer. (See Chapter 2 in Book VI to read about deploying release builds.)

Understanding Solutions and Projects

Visual Studio uses logical containers — projects and ...