Empty Visual Studio Project?

I was misled by the C++ "Empty Project" or "Makefile Project". I cant create new folder there.

Here are three steps to add an empty C# project:

1) Create the project. (Add > New Project > Visual C# > Windows > Empty Project)

2) Exclude it from build. (Build > Configuration Manager, uncheck Build on both Debug and Release configuration)

3) Replace its csproj content with the following 3 liners:

<?xml version="1.0" encoding="utf-8"?>
<Project ToolsVersion="4.0" xmlns="http://schemas.microsoft.com/developer/msbuild/2003">
</Project>

There you go. You can create a folder in this project, yet it does not build.

I found an "Empty Project" under the "Windows" category in both C# and Visual Basic, in Visual Studio 2012. I'm unsure if these are present with Visual Studio 2008 or 2010.

It seems to only create an App.Config file, which can easily be deleted.

The Visual C++ project types has an "Empty Project" in the "General" category.

It comes up with several empty folders ("Header Files", "Resource Files", "Source Files") that are just 'filters' (they aren't on the file system). You can just remove them.

It also has all the properties of a C++ project available, so don't put C/C++ files in there unless you want them built (or you exclude them from the build).

Other than that, it's pretty empty.

Probably even closer to an "empty project" is a "Makefile Project" which is also located in the "General" category of the Visual C++ project templates. It also creates the 3 filter folders, along with a readme.txt file that you can delete. It has the advantage that unless you specifically give it commands to run during the build, it won't do a damn thing.

For Visual Studio 2015 up this can now be done with so-called Shared Projects. This is simply an empty project type that holds source files for use within another project, see here.