Hierarchies and selection

Applies to: Visual Studio Visual 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

When you customize Visual Studio, you should understand how Visual Studio handles hierarchies such as projects and how it uses selection context to determine what is displayed to the user. This section discusses the concepts of Visual Studio hierarchies and selection.

In this section

• Hierarchies in Visual Studio

Describes project hierarchies and the general concept of hierarchies.

• Selection and currency in the IDE

Describes how the Visual Studio integrated development environment (IDE) maintains information about the user's currently active objects and lets VSPackages track currency.

• Selection context objects

Discusses the model for how you can determine the user's selection context focus on a window.

• Feedback to the user

Discusses how the available functionality in Visual Studio is based on the user's current selection context and overall IDE context.

Related sections

• Project types architecture

Provides detailed technical information about project types.