Often, when you’re working you want to quickly open a file, edit that and run it so you can test it. What happens when you press F5 in Visual Studio is that it will start some other project (when you have a solution with more than 1 project). In this post you’ll learn a simple trick that allows you to start the project where the file you just edited is.

The trick

You just need to go to the solution settings and choose Current selection as the Startup Project like so:

Once you do that, every time you select a file, the project in which that file resides will become active so that when you press F5 to run it will start that specific project. Notice how when you select a different file, the project name becomes bolded in the Solution Explorer.

Hopefully, this trick will help you at least in some cases. Of course, it won’t every time (in library projects for example).