this being the first post in this blog, those are the obvious questions. who is easily answered ("josh shepard, a developer on the Visual C++ IDE's project/build system team"), what and why less so. the intention of this blog is to be a source of information on the functionality, features and general nature of the Visual C++ IDE, focusing primarily on the project system, on which i work. hopefully i'll have the chance to answer some of the questions that people have about the VC IDE and provide some insight on why things work (or don't work) the way they do. in my experience working on the VC project system team (a total of about 6 years) i have discovered that most developers don't fully understand how the project system works and thus aren't able to take full advantage of it. i know that i didn't before i started on this team. of course, i'm occasionally surprised by the user that really does have a deep understanding of it. there doesn't seem to be a good source of information about how to set-up projects and solutions that are maintainable, scalable, shareable etc. hopefully i can provide some information here that will help. stay tuned