Leveraging the Solution Explorer

The Solution Explorer is the primary tool for viewing and manipulating solutions and projects. It provides a simple but powerful hierarchical view of all solution and project items, and it enables you to interact with each item directly via context menus and its toolbar.

Using Solution Explorer, you can launch an editor for any given file, add new items to a project or solution, and reorganize the structure of a project or solution. In addition, the Solution Explorer provides instant, at-a-glance information as to the currently selected project; the startup project for the solution; and the physical hierarchy of the solution, its projects, and their child items.

The Solution Explorer is simply a window hosted by Visual Studio. It can be docked, pinned, and floated anywhere within the Visual Studio environment. It is composed of a title bar, a toolbar, and a scrollable tree-view region (see Figure 5.1).

FIGURE 5.1 The Solution Explorer.

The tree view provides a graphics- and text-organizational view of the currently loaded solution. Figure 5.1 shows all the various items and projects represented for a 14-project solution loaded in the IDE.