Importance of more than one project in single solution in Visual studio

Question

Hi all

We can have one solution per project and can have seperate DLL for each of them... Also people club few projects in a single solution in Visual studio.... Why this is preferred i.e. what is important advantage we may get by doing so ?

Answer 1

Ketan Lalcheta Having several projects in a single solution is typical on larger, team based applications. Such code bases comprise of common library projects, unit test libraries, services and console apps.

Following TDD/BDD and/or SOLID Principles in Clean Code (or Onion) Architectures / N-Tier Designs involve breaking up your application code into various types of projects such as Core, Infrastructure, Services, UI, etc.

These architectures decouple abstractions using dependency injections that are typically split in separate library projects.

These types of abstractions make large code bases more testable, maintainable, and stable as it grows over time.

While these projects could be split into separate dedicated solutions, the development and debugging experience is significantly improved when multiple, related projects (in active development) exist in the same solution.

Services can be split into their own solutions with core projects, as well as common projects be found in multiple solutions.

Answer 2

Ore That's not a dumb question. 😉

TBH... I'd be surprised if people understood most of the topics I made references to in my response. I'm only scratching the very surface on many concepts in my first response that many developers might not get deep exposure to for several years.

A Visual Studio (Community / Pro / Enterprise) solution is a file (*.sln) that uses a XML structure to store path references to related projects with various settings and other meta information used for configuring builds, deployment, debugging, etc, etc.

Answer 3

David Carroll Thanks for reassuring me it is not a dumb question 😄

Answer 4

An application may consist of more than one piece of software!

You can have an AWS lambda project that runs in the cloud, backed by a C# ASP.net project that exposes an API, a project containing some cleanup jobs that run every night, some console projects that move data, etc etc..

It can also be a crude way of sharing code, you can have a project in your solution be a dependency of a different project in the same solution.

Also common: Unit test projects that contain nothing but tests.

Answer 5

Ore Download Visual Studio Community Edition, you'll see immediately :P

A solution contains projects which contain actual code files. So if you are starting a new project you have to create a new solution for the project to live in, first.

Answer 6

I have a dumb question: What is a solution?

I am confused

Answer 7

Ore Yeah! Actually, one solution per git repository is usually the way to do it :)

Answer 8

Schindlabua Like a repository for many related projects?

Answer 9

Schindlabua Thanks. I get it now😄

Answer 10

You can include libraries written in any language that is supported by the runtime engine...

Answer 11

Ketan Lalcheta vb / C# / Managed C++👶

Answer 12

CSS / JS / CS Files all in one solution in VS

Answer 13

Could you please elaborate on this Sanjay Kamath

Answer 14

Do you mean I can include vb code library into c++ code? Don't we need some function mangling and all to use library functions ?