It has occurred to me that a very useful feature of Visual Studio 2008 has gone unnoticed by some.  That feature is the ability to have multiple startup projects when you run (F5)  from Visual Studio 2008.

I was working with a gentleman that had written WCF services for a project.  I later found out that he was creating a console application to the side to test the services.  The reason was, he did not know that you could have the test client in the same project as the host and run both during debug session.

Here are the steps to enable this feature:

Suppose I have the following Solution

Now, I want to be able to start the host service and start the client to talk to the service.  So I go and right click on the solution and select the "Set Startup Projects..." option.

The following dialog pops up.

Select "Multiple startup projects:" radio button and change the Action to Start next to the projects you want to start.

Just click OK and then Run (F5).

Happy Coding!