Nesting Projects

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Applies to: yesVisual Studio noVisual Studio for Mac

Note

This article applies to Visual Studio 2017. If you're looking for the latest Visual Studio documentation, see Visual Studio documentation. We recommend upgrading to the latest version of Visual Studio. Download it here

Enterprise application developers who use your VS Package can conveniently group similar types of projects together in Visual Studio by using project nesting. For example, the Enterprise Template project uses nested projects to group projects into categories. Business facade projects, Web UI projects, and so on are grouped together in one category.

In this scenario, there is no limit to the number of projects the developer can nest under each parent project, although the developer can programmatically provide limits. This type of grouping can also be made recursive, in which case the projects of the same type as a child project can be nested under the child to become a subproject of the child, which is a subproject of the parent.

Project nesting is not an intrinsic part of Visual Studio. You have to write the code to enable nesting and subproject nesting within child projects. The parent project is a special VSPackage, or project type, created and registered with its own GUID that includes the code that is required to implement project nesting.

You can find an example on how to nest projects in the How to: Implement nested projects.

Nested projects example

Nested Projects Solution Nested projects example

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