Visual Studio Project vs. Solution

Question

Being new to VS, how may I think of these two concepts, what is the difference?

Answer 1

A solution is a readable text file whose extension is .sln and having a structured content that describes the projects that it contains. A project is a readable XML formatted text file whose extension is .vcxproj and having a structured content according to its XML schema, and whose primary purpose is to contain the listing of source codes filenames and their dependencies or references to other project's source codes as well.

Answer 2

Just to come up with a metaphor..

A solution is like a house, a project like a room. Each room provides a piece of functionality whereas the house, a container of rooms, provides the means to link the rooms together and organize them appropriately.

Kind of corny but I made it up on the fly, so bear with me :)

Answer 3

Solutions are containers used by Visual Studio to organize one or more related projects. When you open a solution in Visual Studio, it will automatically load all the projects it contains.

When you create a new project in Visual Studio, it automatically creates a solution to house the project if there's not a solution already open.

You can set dependencies of projects on other projects in the solution. The dependent project is build after the project it is depending on is built.

For more details refer - https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/visualstudio/ide/quickstart-projects-solutions

If you are from an Eclipse background you would probably go to build path of a project and add a dependency on other project or add an external jar. In VS you can do that in a single container called solution where all related projects are grouped together.

Eg. Let's say you are build and android and iOS app in xamrin, there would be some common code and resources that could go in a separate project and then your android and iOS projects can depend on this common code project. Also you could have projects to test these projects etc.

Answer 4

A project contains executable and library files that make up an application or component of an application.

A solution is a placeholder for logically related projects that make up an application. For example, you could have separate projects for your application's GUI, database access layer, and so on. The projects would be specific divisions for your program's functionality, and the solution would be the umbrella unifying all of them under one application.

Answer 5

Solutions are containers for projects - you can also use them to organize items that are used across different related project (shared dll's and such).

Answer 6

A Solution can have many Projects.

The Solution can also handle managing the dependencies between its different Projects...making sure that each Project gets Built in the appropriate order for the final Solution to work.