Open the start page in Visual Studio after closing a project?

Question

When you start Visual Studio you get a start page with all the latest projects in a list.
But when you\'ve opened and closed a project, how do you open that start page a

Answer 1

Visual Studio 2010-2015

There's a menu item View -> Start Page

Additionally you can choose to keep the start page open when loading a project. There's a check box below the projects list for that.

(Tested in VS2010, VS2012, VS2013, VS2015)

In current versions, you can also use the Quick Launch (Ctrl+Q) to search for the command
(Just type "Start Page" in Quick Launch)

Visual Studio 2017

There's a menu item File -> Start Page

You can configure the behavior of the IDE on startup via Tools -> Options -> Environment -> Startup.

In Visual Studio 2017, the start page will open automatically when the solution is closed. As far as I know, this cannot be changed directly in the IDE but there's an extension that adds that feature. See this question on SO and this VSIX-Extension (but this will disable the start page completely - if you try to open it manually, it will be immediately closed automatically)