Recommendations for setting up a Visual Studio Solution for TFS

Posted by: Imar Spaanjaars at Sunday, November 20, 2011 3:54:42 PM in: TFS

Over the past weeks I received a number of requests to explain how I typically set up my Visual Studio projects so they are easy to manage across a team that uses Team Foundation Server (TFS). I received another request from a client just this week and instead of helping him over the phone or paying him a visit and do it for him, I decided to write a quick document with instructions which eventually resulted in this article.

In this article you'll see how to create a multi-project solution in Visual Studio. I'll show you how you can use this structure to set up an ASP.NET MVC 3 application with a separate class library project for business logic and one or more unit test projects. However, you can use the exact same principles for other types of Visual Studio projects such as Web Forms, Win Forms, WCF and more. Over the past years, I found that this set up brings me the following benefits:

  • It has a clear structure, making it easy to figure out where to find or store something
  • It can be retrieved from TFS without any hassle
  • It allows for easy branching
  • It resolves most reference issues to third party assemblies

This is just my take at setting it up. If you find anything wrong, or have better alternatives to accomplish the same thing: feel free to speak up using the Comments section at the end of this article.

Without further ado, let's get started.

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