Far Away Developer

There is 2 ways :

1. Begin by opening the New Project dialog box : File/New/Project… (or Ctrl-Shift-N). Navigate to the type of project you want. In the solution dropdown, choose Add to Solution. Failure to do that will result in the creation of a new solution. Enter the name of our project and click the OK button.

2. In the Solution Explorer (Ctrl-Alt-L), right-click on the solution node and choose Add/New Project…

This time you don’t need to choose anything in the dropdown. Enter the name of the project and click the OK button.

Each one of those 2 methods will a a new folder with the name you entered. Inside the folder you will find a project file (.csproj or .vbproj) and a .cs (or .vb). By default Visual Studio will generate a default file for the type of project you choose).

Let’s look at the project file.

<Project DefaultTargets="Build" xmlns="http://schemas.microsoft.com/developer/msbuild/2003">

  <PropertyGroup>

    <Configuration Condition=" '$(Configuration)' == '' ">Debug</Configuration>

    <Platform Condition=" '$(Platform)' == '' ">AnyCPU</Platform>

    <ProductVersion>8.0.50727</ProductVersion>

    <SchemaVersion>2.0</SchemaVersion>

    <ProjectGuid>c50693b9-547b-49f0-8850-e3c0a3b0325c</ProjectGuid>

    <OutputType>Library</OutputType>

    <AppDesignerFolder>Properties</AppDesignerFolder>

    <RootNamespace>ClassLibrary1</RootNamespace>

    <AssemblyName>ClassLibrary1</AssemblyName>

  </PropertyGroup>

  <PropertyGroup Condition=" '$(Configuration)|$(Platform)' == 'Debug|AnyCPU' ">

    <DebugSymbols>true</DebugSymbols>

    <DebugType>full</DebugType>

    <Optimize>false</Optimize>

    <OutputPath>bin\Debug\</OutputPath>

    <DefineConstants>DEBUG;TRACE</DefineConstants>

    <ErrorReport>prompt</ErrorReport>

    <WarningLevel>4</WarningLevel>

  </PropertyGroup>

  <PropertyGroup Condition=" '$(Configuration)|$(Platform)' == 'Release|AnyCPU' ">

    <DebugType>pdbonly</DebugType>

    <Optimize>true</Optimize>

    <OutputPath>bin\Release\</OutputPath>

    <DefineConstants>TRACE</DefineConstants>

    <ErrorReport>prompt</ErrorReport>

    <WarningLevel>4</WarningLevel>

  </PropertyGroup>

  <ItemGroup>

    <Reference Include="System" />

    <Reference Include="System.Data" />

    <Reference Include="System.Xml" />

  </ItemGroup>

  <ItemGroup>

    <Compile Include="Class1.cs" />

    <Compile Include="Properties\AssemblyInfo.cs" />

  </ItemGroup>

  <Import Project="$(MSBuildBinPath)\Microsoft.CSharp.targets" />

  <!-- To modify your build process, add your task inside one of the targets below and uncomment it. 

       Other similar extension points exist, see Microsoft.Common.targets.

  <Target Name="BeforeBuild">

  </Target>

  <Target Name="AfterBuild">

  </Target>

  -->

</Project>

As you can see, it’s an xml file. It contains informations about the assembly name, the output type, namespace, version of Visual Studio used to create the project, etc. And it also contains the information used to compile. This is a whole topic so we will not cover it now. Right under we have the reference used by the project and the files it contains . You do not need to remember all that, the important thing is to know what is the purpose of the file. And finally, if you decide to use SourceSafe, all binding information will be added to this file.