VS 2019 C# intellisense not suggesting references from within solution

Question

I'm new to programming so I might not be using some of the correct terminology. I'm running into an issue with InteliSense when calling a C# class from another project within the same solution. It's not suggesting a using statement and is instead trying to get me to create a new class inside of the current project which is not what I want. I am having to go in and add a refernce to the project and then add the using statement in order to get access to the class.

I looked at some of the documentation online and nothing has helped so far. InteliSense appears to configured correctly to suggest using statements. It provide suggestions just fine. I've been able to create lists and then use it to add the proper using statement along with some other things. Just doesn't want to work with anything inside the solution. I've been following a couple of different tutorials including, .net core 2.1 and 3.1, inside MVC and Razor page projects along with a couple just straight C# console apps. It doesn't work in any of them when I start adding multiple projects to the solution and try using classes from outside the current project.

Answer 1

I am having to go in and add a refernce to the project and then add the using statement in order to get access to the class.

That is the correct behavior. In order for ProjectB to use classes defined in ProjectA, you must first add a reference to ProjectA. Just having the projects in the same solution is not sufficient.

The purpose of having multiple projects in the same solution is simply for grouping related code. The projects may or may not actually depend on each other. For example, a web application may have a separate projects for the actual web UI (the pages themselves), a data access layer, unit tests, maybe some class libraries for shared code used by multiple projects, and maybe even console applications (or some other project type) for performing backend administrative tasks. In this scenario, the web UI and console applications may have references to the data access layer project and/or the class libraries. The unit test project will have a reference to the web UI project, and so on. The dependencies are one-way - you may not have circular references (the unit test project has the web UI project as a dependency, but not the other way).