Chapter 2. The Visual Studio 2015 IDE for Visual Basic

You develop Visual Basic applications by using the Visual Studio 2015 Integrated Development Environment (IDE), which is where you will spend most of your developer life. Before diving deep into the Visual Basic language, you need to know what instruments you need in order to develop applications. Although the Visual Studio IDE is a complex environment, this chapter provides an overview of the most common tasks you will perform from within Visual Studio 2015 and the most important tools you will utilize so that you can feel at home within the IDE. You’ll get an introduction to some of the new features in the new version of the IDE that you’ll use throughout this book. You’ll learn more about some advanced IDE features in Part X, “Code Analysis with VB 2015,” and the online chapters.

It is worth mentioning that many IDE features have been completely rebuilt on the .NET Compiler Platform. Therefore, the migration of some tools might be incomplete in Visual Studio 2015; the Call Hierarchy tool window described at the end of the chapter provides one example. This chapter tells you where there are differences between migrated tools and their previous versions.