Creating Your First Project

The next, natural step is to create your first project. You might have an existing project you want to open, or you might be starting fresh. In either case, creating or opening a project quickly exposes you to some of the basic project and file management features within the IDE.

To get started, you can click the File menu or the New Project link on the Start Page. Assuming you are using the File menu, you see the options to create a new project or a website under the New submenu. Projects are simply templates that group files for Windows, Office, web, and similar applications. Visual Studio supports web projects as templates-driven web applications and websites as a set of files that are promoted and managed to your web server as files. You might also have multiple projects grouped together to form a single application. In this case, each project might be grouped under a single solution. Figure 2.14 shows an example of the New Project dialog box. Notice that a Visual C# ASP.NET Web Application is being created, along with a new solution to house the project. For more information on solutions, see Chapter 4, “Solutions and Projects.”

FIGURE 2.14 Creating a new project as a C# web application.