C# 4 and .NET 4

384 ❘ ChaPTer 16 visuAl studiO 2010
that ship as libraries of the parts of the application. You might even have a different user interface for
administrators. Each of these parts of the application might be contained in a separate assembly, and hence,
they are regarded by Visual Studio as separate projects. However, it is quite likely that you will be coding
these projects in parallel and in conjunction with each other. Thus, it is quite useful to be able to edit them
all as one single unit in Visual Studio. Visual Studio allows this by regarding all the projects as forming one
solution and by treating the solution as the unit that it reads in and allows you to work on.
Up until now, we have been loosely talking about creating a console project. In fact, in the example you
are working on, Visual Studio has actually created a solution for you — although this particular solution
contains just one project. You can see the situation in a window in Visual Studio known as the Solution
Explorer (see Figure 16 - 10), which contains a tree structure that defi nes your solution.
Figure 16 - 10 shows that the project contains your source file, Program.cs ,
as well as another C# source file, AssemblyInfo.cs (found in the
Properties folder), which allows you to provide information that
describes the assembly as well as the ability to specify versioning
information. (You look at this file in detail in Chapter 18, “ Assemblies. ” )
The Solution Explorer also indicates the assemblies that your project
references according to namespace. You can see this by expanding the
References folder in the Solution Explorer.
If you have not changed any of the default settings in Visual Studio, you
will probably fi nd the Solution Explorer in the top - right corner of your
screen. If you cannot see it, just go to the View menu and select Solution
Explorer.
The solution is described by a fi le with the extension .sln — in this
figure 16-10
example, it is ConsoleApplication1.sln . The project is described by
various other fi les in the project ’ s main folder. If you attempt to edit these
fi le s u si ng N ot epad , you w i l l fi nd t h at t he y a re mo s t ly pl a i n - t ex t fi le s , a nd , i n ac c ord a nc e w it h t he pr i nc iple
that .NET and .NET tools rely on open standards wherever possible, they are mostly in XML format.
C++ developers will recognize that a Visual Studio solution corresponds to an old
Visual C++ project workspace (stored in a .dsw fi le), and a Visual Studio project
corresponds to an old C++ project (.dsp fi le). By contrast, Visual Basic developers will
recognize that a solution corresponds to an old Visual Basic project group (.vbg fi le),
and the .NET project corresponds to an old Visual Basic project (.vbp fi le). Visual
Studio differs from the old Visual Basic IDE in that it always creates a solution for
you automatically. In Visual Studio 6, Visual Basic developers would get a project;
however, they would need to request a project group from the IDE separately.
adding another Project to the solution
As you work through the following sections, you will see how Visual Studio works with Windows
applications as well as with console applications. To that end, you create a Windows project called
BasicForm that you will add to your current solution, ConsoleApplication1 .
This means that you will end up with a solution containing a Windows application and
a console application. That is not a very common scenario — you are more likely to
have one application and a number of libraries — but it allows you to see more code!
You might, however, create a solution like this if, for example, you are writing a utility
that you want to run either as a Windows application or as a command-line utility.
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