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Introduction to Microsoft Visual Studio 2008 Tutorials

Visual Studio IDE / Understanding Solutions & Projects

Subtitles of the Movie

In the real world you may get put on this massive database project that's going to be involving like six different databases and four different user interfaces into those databases that are used by different departments. Well, how cool is it that we can put all of that into one Solution and give it one name, like you know, our company name DatabaseProject, and then put multiple different projects inside there, and it's very easy to organize ourselves and maintain all of our files. Now, inside the Solution one of the main things you're going to see there is a Project, and this is important because a Project maps directly to a compiled component. So, if I name a project Mark and then I add four forms and a bunch of code and stuff and a couple of classes and then I compile this, that's going to compile into the Mark Application, the Mark Executable if you will, OK? Now, a project will contain certain items based on the Project Type, and again, you'll see that in different videos as we go through, but if I open a Windows Application Project then it's going to set certain references for me, import certain name spaces, and so forth, and it's going to give me a blank form by default. If I do it in ASP.NET Web Services Project again, it's going to show me some different things and give me a blank Web Page by default. So, the projects are what we use to build our applications and they become our applications and we store the projects and any other related files in the Solutions. Now, a project has Definition Files, and these are XML-based files, and again I'll show you this in the Development Environment a little bit later in a different video, but I want to mention them here because from time to time this is a neat trick because if I go out there and look for the .VB project file, .vbproj for Visual Basic applications, this is all of my definitions for that particular file, and sometimes you'll get in situations and you'll be Googling something that's broken or you want to make some changes you can actually go make them in that file, OK? So anyway, I just want you to know that's out there. If it's C# it'll be .csproj. If it's C++ it'll have a name .vcproj. That's just a quick overview of Solutions and Projects. It's very important that you get the Definition in your head and then look at it in the real world, OK, that we're going to create a Solution when we create our first Project then we can add multiple Projects to it and a Solution simply holds all of our Projects and related files together.

Tutorial Information

Course: Introduction to Microsoft Visual Studio 2008
Author: Mark Long
SKU: 34008
ISBN: 1-935320-54-8
Release Date: 2009-06-26
Duration: 7 hrs / 72 lessons
Captions: Available on CD and Online University
Compatibility: Vista/XP/2000, OS X, Linux
QuickTime 7, Flash 8

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