Week 3: At a Glance

Week 3 teaches you about the more interesting and exciting features of Visual Studio .NET. You'll start the week by learning how to write internationally aware applications, and how to write macros and add-ins to customize and extend the Visual Studio .NET environment using the automations features of the IDE. You'll also learn about the new reporting capabilities using the built-in Crystal Reports for .NET. In addition, you'll learn how to use Microsoft Application Test Center to stress test your applications. You'll finish the week with a lesson on using Visual SourceSafe from Visual Studio .NET and how to use object role modeling and Visio to create conceptual data models.

Week 3 covers the following:

• Day 15 teaches you how to use the System.Globalization namespace in the framework class library to write applications that are culturally sensitive. You'll learn how to modify the culture settings of a computer based on user preference, and how to alter the running threads' culture information to write language-specific applications.

• Day 16 teaches you how to write macros for Visual Studio .NET. Like macros in Microsoft Word or Microsoft Excel, the macros in Visual Studio .NET simplify your life by making repetitive tasks automatic inside the IDE.

• Day 17 builds on your macro knowledge and teaches you how to write separate add-in applications. Add-ins are separate COM-based applications written in .NET that give you full reign over the functionality of the Visual Studio .NET IDE. You'll learn how to create interactive forms that can access the Toolbox and Code Editor in Visual Studio .NET.

• Day 18 introduces you to Crystal Reports for Visual Studio .NET. You'll learn how to write data-driven reports for both Windows Forms and ASP.NET applications, and how to use the special Report Viewer component to view reports in both types of applications.

• Day 19 teaches you how to use Microsoft Application Test Center. Using the specific testing techniques that you learn today, you'll be able to effectively determine how your ASP.NET applications will perform when they're used outside the development environment. Understanding benchmarks such as how long a page takes to load when one user hits it versus one thousand users hit it will help you fine-tune your code to work for the optimal target environment.

• Day 20 covers the code management features supplied by Microsoft Visual SourceSafe. Keeping your code versioned and safe from destruction will help you sleep better at night. Learning how to use Visual Studio .NET's built-in tools to manage your code will make your development cycle worry-free and flexible.

• Day 21 introduces you to conceptual data design with Visio. Using a technology called object role modeling, you'll learn how to break down application processes into regular sentences. Then you'll find out how to take those sentences and plug them into Visio to create a data model that can be used to automatically create any ODBC database, including SQL Server and Oracle.