Express is the free version of Visual Studio.

Yes, I said free, as in "without cost."

Express is made for hobbyists, but many professional programmers I know use it as their "home" edition, for small personal projects, or for working on open source projects.

Although Express is significantly less functional than the Professional Edition, nearly every code sample in this book can be compiled in Express. It has the power of the .NET Framework, which is also free, and gives you a significant means of learning C#.

Express edition is not designed for making production software. It lacks several project types and many of the tools for team development. Nonetheless, it runs C# as well as anything else — remember that C# is just a language.

Express has a number of different subeditions. They split the main technologies of .NET into parts. You can't build packaged software for sale using these editions, but you sure can learn with it. The different subeditions are described in this list:

Professional Edition is designed for professional programmers. This edition of Visual Studio is the one I use daily. It's made to generate standalone programs that solve specific problems.

Microsoft is on the ball, with three goals for its Professional Edition:

That hits the nail on the head. This is the edition that the entire book is built on, and what I recommend for the production of most programs.

As good as it is, Professional doesn't have every feature that Microsoft has to offer. The comprehensive team management features, reporting, check-in, and testing features are reserved for the pricy version: Team System.

Visual Studio Team System, usually referred to as VSTS, is the grand pooh-bah of the Microsoft platform. It connects to Team Foundation Server (a Microsoft product that provides team metrics for software development), which provides a plethora of software creation metrics when teams are involved in the development.

Figure 1-1 shows a little of what I'm talking about. Build statistics and development details can be gathered using the dashboard provided in SharePoint.

Facts are facts — Team System is cool software, but it just doesn't work without a big enterprise environment around you. It needs SharePoint, Exchange, and SQL Server to work right.

Figure 1-1. Managing software development with Team Foundation Server.

The Microsoft Developer Network (MSDN) subscription is by far the best way to get Microsoft products. It seems like setting up a development environment to develop anything of significance would be impossibly expensive. This is not necessarily the case.

The MSDN subscription is exactly what it sounds like — a subscription to a majority of the Microsoft products that matter. For around a thousand dollars a year, you get access to everything you need. This isn't actually an edition of Visual Studio.

That sounds like a lot, but think about it this way — even if you do only one project a year on your own time, your investment will pay off. Considering the fact that Visual Studio alone is half of that, and it gets a revision every two years or so, it's a bargain. Along with Visual Studio Professional, you also get subscriptions to

Basically how it works is this — you go to Amazon or elsewhere and buy an MSDN license code. Then you go to msdn.microsoft.com and register the code with your Live account. From there, depending on your license level, you can download the software for development use only.

That point is an important one. The products you get from MSDN are for development purpose. So, yes, you get SQL Server (for instance). No, you can't put up your new Widget store on the Internet using the MSDN license.

So the operating system in the MSDN license is for development only. That's okay. This is a development book. If you can get MSDN, get it.

If you can't afford MSDN but you're a school student or an instructor, buy the Academic edition of Visual Studio, intended just for learning institutions. It's less expensive than MSDN, but is even more limited from the licensing perspective.

The Academic edition now costs only a hundred bucks or so. That means it costs more than the free Express edition, but it has all the features of Professional. If you're just in it to learn, it's a helpful option. If you want to deploy production software, though, you have to look elsewhere. This product isn't licensed for it.

Students, teachers, head over to the school bookstore. If they don't have Visual Studio Academic, tell them they should get it.

Table 1-1 describes the big features that Microsoft sees and the features in different versions. I use it every time I recommend software to a client, and I hope you find it just as useful.

Let's start with a breakdown of the New Project dialog box, shown in Figure 1-2. This screen is an important part of the usability of Visual Studio. You open it by clicking the New Project link on the setup page.

The section of the dialog box to the far left is a tree-view selector, similar to the one in Outlook. You have three options — Recent Templates, Installed Templates, and Online templates. Installed Templates is selected. These templates, as Visual Studio calls them, are project types.

Within the selector is a WPF style tree viewer. Instead of maples and oaks, this tree viewer has all the project categories described in upcoming sections of this chapter.

If you click, for example, the Visual C# option in the tree view, all the projects for Visual C# appear in the window just to the right. If you click one of the suboptions, just those project types — for Visual C# —appear.

To specify the version of the .NET Framework you would like to develop for, you can use the drop-down list just above the project list that currently says .NET Framework 4.0. To change the sorting options, use the Sort By: drop-down list directly to the right. One more step to the right and you can change your view options.

Figure 1-2. So many (project) options!

In the upper-right corner is a search box, which isn't as silly as it sounds given the large number of templates now in Visual Studio. Just below the search box is the description panel, where you can see a text description of the selected project type.

At the bottom are three important text boxes:

For more about solutions and projects, see the next section.

Visual Studio project files, and the solutions that love them, are a constant topic of interest to Microsoft developers. You work on one solution at a time, with a number of projects within. How you organize your solutions and their projects will make or break you when it comes time to find something.

You can think of solutions as folders that hold projects. They're just folders with special properties. In fact, note the check box shown earlier, in Figure 1-2. It's the one labeled Create Directory for Solution. That's what I mean — the solution is really an organizational "folder" for the projects.

Projects are where you put the code files for your programs. They store all kinds of things, like references to the .NET Framework, resources like graphics or files, and what file should be used to start the project.

Solutions do the same thing for projects that projects do for files. They keep the projects in a folder, and store certain properties. For instance, they store which project should be started when debugging starts.

Neither the project nor the solutions have much to do with a finished program. They are just simple organizational structures for Visual Studio. The installation of finished program is determined by the setup project. The solution itself is just a logical storage mechanism for the source files.

In reality, the solution is more than a folder. It's a file in a folder that is used by Visual Studio to manage the developer experience. So, inside the folder for the solution is a file describing the projects within, and then a bunch of folders with the projects themselves.

There are files for the projects, too — files that describe the resources and references for the project. They are all XML files that contain text references to the values that you set using Visual Studio.

When developing in Visual Studio, you shouldn't worry about that. In 14 years of working in various versions of Visual Studio, I have had to look at a solution or project file only a few times, and only in special situations. Knowing how they work, however, will help you design your project structure.

The way I work is to look at what I want to be a finished program and consider it a solution. Above that, I have a client folder. The result looks like Figure 1-3.

Figure 1-3. My preferred project structure.

This strategy keeps me much more organized and works with the Visual Studio model. All I have to do is use the Browse button to change the location of the project and solution. It also helps to make the main project of a solution first (like the user interface) before the rest of the solution.

The following list describes the project types listed in the New Project dialog box in Visual Studio. These kinds of finished programs are ones you can make using the installed templates.