Day 2. Introduction to Visual Studio .NET

Yesterday you learned about the .NET Framework and what it means to you as a developer. For the next 20 days, you're going to learn how to write applications using the .NET Framework and how to use the tools to achieve rapid application development (RAD). All of that starts with having a solid understanding of the development tool that you'll be using: Visual Studio .NET. Visual Studio .NET includes everything you need to rapidly develop and debug all aspects of any type of application that you can think of. It's somewhat overshadowed by the whole concept of .NET. The bottom line to you is that anything and everything was thought of when the development environment was designed. In fact, most of it was written using .NET. So, from the .NET Framework to the tool you use to write .NET Framework applications, .NET was used. Many of the items you learn about today might seem to be stating the obvious, if you're a seasoned Visual Basic 6 or Visual Studio 6 developer, and most of the IDE might seem familiar, or at least can be figured out by clicking around for a few hours. I still recommend reading through this chapter because there are some nice features in .NET that might pleasantly surprise you. Today you learn about

• The many windows and menu options available in Visual Studio .NET

• Generating help pages for your applications

• How to use Dynamic Help

• The different project types and what types of applications you can write

• Creating code libraries using the .NET Toolbox

• Customizing your development environment