How to introduce multiple releases for various functionalities in Visual Studio project?

One way is like that:

a) Create One Function InitializeComponent(Key)

// Key is passed as argument.
For Different client, the key is different
For Client 'A' it is 3123123
For Client 'B' it is 2343454

b)Client must use this function.

c) Check the key value is correct.

c) According to that key only feature is available to client.

Hi Rajesh,
Use the Visual Studio Configuration Manager (in Build menu) to create different project configurations, see How to: Create and Edit Configurations[^].
Use compile time definitions to adjust specific configuration features.
cheers,
AR

This is a large topic and there are many considerations. For example, at one extreme you can have one executable and use run-time flags to control which features are seen. At the other extreme you can create different release configurations (see below) that define macros (for conditional compilation) and only link to the relevant libraries.

The advantage of the first method is that the development, build and distribution process is simplified. The disadvantage is in efficiency (a larger distribution and probably more memory use etc).

The advantage of the second is that each release is close to the optimum for its requirement. However, if there are many differences then the conditional compilation can make the source code a mess.

In practice you will probably use a compromise between these two extremes. For example, you could create a simple "plugin" system where different plugins (DLLs) are only used if present - as someone else already suggested.

Another alternative is to use inheritance where the core system consists of many base classes with virtual "hook" functions. Variations of the product could use different derived classes to override the virtual functions to provide different behaviours.

Configurations

By default Visual Studio only creates two configurations (Debug and Release), but you can use the Configurations manager to create extra release configurations by cloning the existing release config. Then you can use the Properties pages to define preprocessor flags (C/C++ -> Preprocessor -> Preprocessor Defintions) that can control your compilation, and change which libraries you link with (Link -> Input -> Additional Dependencies).

Thank you all for your response.

I have read each of the solutions and admire the knowledge exhibhited in each of them.

All the solutions are genuine and feasible. I think that making different Visual Studio Configurations will be sufficient for my needs
and I will try this. If it does not work, I may evaluate other solutions.

In a VS2010 project, I created a new configuration C2 copying settings from C1. The purpose of having new configuration was to do conditional compiling. I thought I can achieve it thru different peprocessors. But I found that when I define a processor in either C1 or C2, it gets reflected in both C1 & C2. How this can be stopped? Can different configurations have different preprocessor defintion? or there is some different mechanism to achieve it?

Something else to consider is to make sure that the target machine has the version of .NET installed that you are targeting with your VS2010 project.