The purpose of Project explorer is to provide a graphic interface to manage Silverlight project resources. Project explorer shows all opened projects used by ESL: in eclipse terminology, all projects of the Silverlight nature. The synchronization with Eclipse resource system is automatic in following situations:
Each Visual Studio project has a configuration file <project name>.csproj under the root level of each project. This configuration file is in fact a XML file of msbuild schema. It plays same role as .classpath in Java project. It declares all resources used by the project and it is used to build Silverlight application like Apache Ant for Java. ESL adopts completely the Visual Studio project structure in order to keep the direct compatibility. The import of Visual Studio 2008/Blend projects is strainghtforward and the export is not necessary.
Therefore, Project explorer reflects in fact the resource view of <project name>.csproj. In other words, some resources in a project may not be displayed in Project explorer if they aren't registered in this file. This file is not exposed to developers. Project explorer provides all necessary actions to configuration the project via context menu such as: