How to setup multiple startup projects in Visual Studio ?

In this blog post, I am going to describe small tips of Visual Studio where you will get to know how you can launch multiple projects at the same time. This is quite useful when you are working on a solution which has multiple project types and you want to run a few of them at the same time.

Let’s assume you have a frontend application which developed using WPF and in the backend you are calling a WCF Service. Now to test the application, you need both of them in the running stage. By default, Visual Studio project Setup type sets to “Single Startup Project”. If you set any of the projects as "Start up”, then that project will start when you run the application. So after that, you need to run the second project also. Below is the Project setup window where you can find all the settings related to the project start up. You can open that window by right clicking on “Solution” > “Properties” > “Common Properties” > “Startup Project”.

Now, if you look at the above picture, you will find that we have three options for project setup.

1. Current Selection: This selection will automatically select the project as startup whenever you will click on the project.

   

2. Single Startup Project: This is the default setup for Visual Studio where the first created project will be set as startup. If you want to change the startup project, just right click on the project and select “Set as Startup Project” or Open the properties windows and select the project from the dropdown window of “Single startup project” as shown in the below picture:

   

3. Multiple Startup Project: For the above two options, you can run only one project at a time. So if you want to run multiple applications at the same time, you can change the setting from Multiple project setup section. Using multiple startup project settings, you can set the multiple startup project from the “Action Tab”.

   

So if you set both of the project actions “Start” and run the application, both of these projects will run. So you do not need to rework to start the different project again.

I hope this post will help you and save your time from the next time.

Thanks !

AJ

Filed under: General, My Articles, Visual Studio, Visual Studio 2010