Project Context
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 the user adds or works with projects and project items, the IDE uses the notion of project context to determine how various operations should be performed.
Typically, files are the standard project objects that the user explicitly creates by selecting the New Project command or makes available by selecting the Open Project command on the File menu. In these cases, files are created and opened in the context of a project and the project type defines the context for editing the document.
Some projects provide a very rich context. For example, the project manages a project-scoped, programmatic namespace or project-scoped database connection for data binding. The user can frequently open files or database connections directly by using a particular project object, such as a project item displayed in Solution Explorer.
At other times, the project context of an item is not explicitly specified. For example, the context of an item is not available when the user opens a file by selecting the Open Existing File command on the File menu, when the debugger operates on a file, or when the user clicks the Find In Files command in the Find and Replace dialog box. To handle these situations, the IDE calls IVsUIShellOpenDocument to manage the process of finding the best project to open a document.