Adding a Project

• Adding a Project

One of the most valuable features of Microsoft Visual Studio 2005 is that it allows you to work on more than one project without launching more than one instance of the studio. This means that you can add a project to another project you are working on and treat each as a separate entity.

Before adding one project to another, you must save, or you must have saved, the current project. To add a project, in the Solution Explorer, you can right-click the most top node (it starts with Solution) and position the mouse on Add:

If you have a project that was previously saved but you don't want to open a separate instance of Microsoft Visual Studio for it, you can click Existing Project... This would bring the Add Existing Project dialog box that allows you to select a project from a folder.

To add a new project, after right-clicking, you can click New Project... If you add a new project, and if you want to keep it for future references, you must save it. To save the new project, you can click the Save All button on the Standard toolbar. After saving the new project, a folder with its name would be created inside of the folder of the solution.

On the right side of the name of the solution in Solution, the number of its projects is specified in parentheses, as 1 project, or 2 projects, etc.

After adding a project, each would be represented by its own node in the Solution Explorer and in the Class View. Here is an example:

Also, a sub-folder for each project is created in the folder of the solution:

In the Solution, the name of one of the projects, if there is more than one, is in bold characters. This project is called the StartUp Project. If, on the main menu, you click Debug -> Start Without Debugging, the project in bold characters would be executed. If you want to change the start up project, you can right-click its node and click Set As StartUp Project.