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 2003 and Office 2007 product suites.

• Smart Device: Similar to Windows, the Smart Device category provides project types for applications and libraries that run on the Windows Mobile or Windows CE platforms.

• WCF: This category contains a number of project types for creating applications that provide Windows Communication Foundation (WCF) services.

• Web: The Web category includes the project types that run under ASP.NET. This includes ASP.NET web applications, XML web services, and control libraries for use in web applications and rich, AJAX-enabled web applications.

• Workflow: This contains a number of project types for sequential and state machine workflow libraries and applications.

The New Project dialog box in Visual Studio 2008, shown in Figure 6-4, enables you to browse and create any of these project types. The target .NET Framework version is listed in a drop-down selector in the top right-hand corner of this dialog box. If a project type is not supported by the selected .NET Framework version, such as a WPF application under .NET Framework 2.0, then that project type will not be displayed.

Figure 6.4. Figure 6-4