Open the start page in Visual Studio after closing a project?

Visual Studio 2010-2015

There's a menu item View -> Start Page

Additionally you can choose to keep the start page open when loading a project. There's a check box below the projects list for that.

(Tested in VS2010, VS2012, VS2013, VS2015)

In current versions, you can also use the Quick Launch (Ctrl+Q) to search for the command
(Just type "Start Page" in Quick Launch)

Visual Studio 2017

There's a menu item File -> Start Page

You can configure the behavior of the IDE on startup via Tools -> Options -> Environment -> Startup.

In Visual Studio 2017, the start page will open automatically when the solution is closed. As far as I know, this cannot be changed directly in the IDE but there's an extension that adds that feature. See this question on SO and this VSIX-Extension (but this will disable the start page completely - if you try to open it manually, it will be immediately closed automatically)

You also have the Start Page icon in the toolbar :

In VS2013 by default I do not see the "Start Page" command in the View menu but adding it was simple. The icon also looks different in VS2013.

• Right click on the toolbar and choose Customize... at the bottom then go to Commands

• Switch to Toolbar/Standard and then click the Add Command button an locate the View group on the left

• Finally locate the Start Page item and click OK.

In VS 2017 the new location for viewing the start page is under the 'file' menu. as appears in this link:

https://developercommunity.visualstudio.com/content/problem/4603/view-start-page-menu-item-is-missing.html

In VS 2017 it's in File->Start Page.