Understanding Project Files

Each Visual Basic project is composed of several code files. Some of them are by default visible to the developer and are the ones that you need to edit to create your application. There are also some other files (which are hidden by default but that can be made visible manually) that we can consider as support files. To understand what kind of support these files offer, we have to think that most of the settings that we can provide to our applications via the My Project window are represented with Visual Basic code. Particularly, Visual Basic translates into code the content of the Application, Resources, Settings and My Extensions tabs. In this chapter you get a detailed description of files that represent the Application tab in My Project and then you get an overview of files that represent other tabs. Although you seldom edit these code files manually, because all of them have design time support from My Project (as detailed in Chapter 20, “The ‘My’ Namespace,” when describing the My namespace), there could be some situations in which you need to manually edit them, so it’s important to know something about them. Before going on, you need to click the Show All Files button in Solution Explorer. This gives visibility to several code files that are hidden by default and that provide the main infrastructure for each Visual Basic project.