The Project Explorer organizes your projects and files and provides quick access to the commands that operate on them. A tool bar at the top of thw window offers quick access to commonly used commands for the item selected in the Project Explorer.

This section gives a brief overview of the project explorer window and its operation, but for a complete description of how to work with projects and how to manage them, please refer to Project system.

###### The Project Explorer tool bar

Button | Description
| Adds a new file to the project using the New File dialog.
| Adds an existing files to the project.
| Removes files, folders, projects, and links from the project.
| Creates a new folder in the project.
| Builds the active project.
| Disassembles the selected project item.
| Sets project explorer options.
| Displays the properties dialog for the selected item.

###### Showing the Project Explorer

To activate the Project Explorer if it is hidden, do one of the following:

- From the View menu, click Project Explorer.

—or—

- Type Ctrl+Alt+P.

—or—

- On the Standard tool bar, click the Project Explorer icon.

—or—

- Right click the tool bar area to display the View menu.
- From the popup menu, click Project Explorer.

###### Setting project properties

When you select an item in the project explorer, the properties window displays the properties that can be set for the item. This allows you to set compilation options for source files, for instance.

###### Opening files for editing

Double clicking a source file will load it into the code editor for editing. As you switch between files in the editor, the selection in the project explorer changes to highlight the file that you're currently editing.

###### Source code control

Using the the project explorer you can check files into and out of a source code control system. Right clicking on a source file brings up a context menu with the following source code control operations:

- Check In checks a file into source code control.
- Check Out checks a source file out of the repository and makes it writable.
- Undo Check Out undoes a check out and reverts the file on disk to the one in the source code control system.
- Add To Source Control adds a file to source control.
- Remove From Source Control removes a file from source control and deletes it from the source code control database.

For more information on source code control, see Source code control.

###### Related sections

See the Project management section.