Working with Projects and Solutions

Each time you want to develop an application, you create a project. A project is a collection of files, such as code files, resources, data, and every kind of file you need to build your final assembly. A Visual Basic project is represented by a .Vbproj file, which is an Xml file containing all the information required by Visual Studio to manage files that constitute your project. Projects are organized in solutions. A solution is basically a container for projects. In fact, solutions can contain infinite projects of different kinds, such as Visual Basic projects, projects produced with programming languages different than Visual Basic, class libraries, projects for Windows client applications, Windows Communication Foundation services, and so on. In other words, a solution can include each kind of project you can create with Visual Studio 2010. Solutions also can contain external files, such as documents or help files, and are represented by a .Sln file that has Xml structure and that stores information required to manage all the projects contained in the solution. Visual Studio 2010 can also open solutions created with previous versions of the IDE.

Typically you manage your projects and solutions using the Solution Explorer window discussed later in this chapter. We now focus on the creation of Visual Basic 2010 projects.