You have now created a simple project, and in this section we will set some options for the project.

You can set project options on any node of the solution. That is, you can set options on a solution-wide basis, on a project-wide basis, on a project group basis, or on an individual file basis. For instance, options that you set on a solution are inherited by all projects in that solution, by all groups in each of those projects, and then by all files in each of those groups. If you set an option further down in the hierarchy, that setting will be inherited by nodes that are children of (or grandchildren of) that node. The way that options are inherited provides a very powerful way to customize and manage your projects.

###### Changing the target processor

In this instance, we will set up the target processor to be a mega32. To do this:

- Right click the Tutorial project in the Project Explorer and select Properties from the menu—the Project Options dialog appears.
- Click the Configuration dropdown and change to the Common configuration.
- Click the Code Generation tab (shown as Co...) to display the code generation options.
- Click the Target Processor option and change this from ATmega128 to ATmega32.

The dialog box will now look like this:

Notice that when you change between Debug and Release configurations, the code generation options change. This dialog shows which options are used when building a project (or anything in a project) in a given configuration. Because we have set the target processor in the Common configuration, both Debug and Release configurations will use this setting. We could, however, set the processor type to be different in Debug and Release configurations, allowing us to develop on a processor with a large amount of code memory and hardware emulation support, but elect to deploy on a smaller, more cost effective variant.

Now click OK to accept the changes made to the project.

###### Using the Properties Window

If you click on the project node, the Properties Window will show the properties of the project—these have all been inherited from the solution. If you modify a property when the project node is selected then you’ll find that its value is highlighted because you have overridden the property value that was inherited from the solution. You can restore the inherited value of a property by right clicking the property and selecting Use Inherited Value from the menu.

Next, we'll build the project.