Visual Studio: How to create Blank or Empty Solution

When starting a project with a solution that will contain multiple projects, it may be best to begin with entirely empty solution and then add new or existing projects to that blank solution. We are going to demonstrate how to do that using Visual Studio 2022. We will also briefly touch on the problem when the blank solution is missing.

First, we launch Visual Studio and select "Create new project" from the starting window as shown below:

Step 1 - Create blank/empty solution

In the "Create a new project" window, you will see the list of available templates on the right side.

We can find the blank or empty solution in several ways. One way is to click on the 3rd drop-down menu that has "All project types" selected and choose "Other" from the list of project types.

Another option is to search for either the "solution" or "blank" keyword into search box. The "Blank Solution" template should be the only template listed.

Select the template and click the "Next" button to go to the next step.

Missing blank solution template

It seems, that some people can't find the blank solution in the list of available templates. If this is also the case for you, check the fixing missing blank solution article on how to solve this problem.

Step 2 - Configure your project

In this step we need to configure the project we selected, in our case, it's just a blank solution so we only need to set:

• Solution name
• Location of the solution

Next, we click the "Create" button to create the blank solution.

The folder with the solution name will be created in the location path that we provided. Inside the folder, we will find the solution .sln file and a .vs hidden folder. The hidden folder will contain a .suo file that is used by Visual Studio to store user preference settings.

What to do with the empty solution

The Visual Studio should now fully load with Solution Explorer containing the empty solution.

By right-clicking on it, we can now add existing or add new projects as seen below:

When we choose to add a new project, the same window that lists all of the templates appears and we can add the project template that we want.

Conclusion

In this article, we learned how to create a new blank solution in Visual Studio. After we create it, we need to configure it by giving the solution a name and path location. Following that, the Visual Studio generates an empty solution from which we can then add new or existing projects.