One of the most important and useful features of Visual Studio is the solution and project handling. Since the whole workflow is integrated into the IDE, the developer does not have the burden of dealing with files, working paths, and libraries. All of these can be managed directly in the IDE with the powerful Visual Studio user interface.
Before we dig into the tools in detail, we will first take a look at the Visual Studio lingo relating to project handling. The two main concepts used in this chapter are the solution and the project.
A solution is essentially a container of projects that are bundled together to cover a unique scope. The projects can be referenced to each other and they can be of different types. For example, in a solution, you can mix a Python project with a C++ project while referencing the output of the project in the Python solution to use it as an external library. A solution also provides a way to group the whole code base of work in a single...