Chapter Five. Using Visual Studio .NET

So far, I have built all of the examples using the command-line tools in the .NET Framework SDK. Unless you are a luddite or a glutton for punishment, you will probably not write software for the .NET Framework using these primitive tools. Most people will use Visual Studio .NET, or some other IDE to write software for the .NET Platform. Visual Studio .NET is the latest version of Microsoft's Visual Studio product that was specifically designed for the .NET Framework. It contains integrated form designers, code and image editors, an integrated debugger, and new design tools for creating XML schemas and database queries. It also contains a design tool called the server explorer that allows you to view all of the server resources (SQL Servers, message queues, performance counters, services, and so forth) that are currently available on your network.

In this chapter, I will build an assembly that contains a spell-checker component. I also build a Windows Forms client and a Web Forms client. Along the way, you will learn how to use Visual Studio .NET to create and implement a project. As a bonus, you will also learn about XML code documentation, which (particularly when used with Visual Studio .NET) makes it easy for you to create code comments that can be extracted as an XML document and then transformed into an easily readable HTML form using an Extensible Style Language Transformation (XSLT).