INTRODUCING THE IDE

The chapters in the first part of this book describe the Visual Studio integrated development environment (IDE). They explain the most important windows, menus, and toolbars that make up the environment, and show how to customize them to suit your needs. They explain some of the tools that provide help while you are writing Visual Basic applications and how to use the IDE to debug programs.

Even if you are an experienced Visual Basic programmer, you should at least skim this material. The IDE is extremely complex and provides hundreds (if not thousands) of commands, menus, toolbars, windows, context menus, and other tools for editing, running, and debugging Visual Basic projects.

Even after you’ve read these chapters, you should periodically spend some time wandering through the IDE to see what you’ve missed. Every month or so, spend a few minutes exploring little-used menus and right-clicking things to see what their context menus contain. As you become a more proficient Visual Basic programmer, you will find uses for tools that you may have dismissed or not understood before.

This chapter explains how to get started using the IDE. It tells how to configure the IDE for different kinds of development. It explains Visual Basic projects and solutions, and shows how to create, run, and save new projects. This chapter is mostly an introduction to the chapters that follow. The other chapters in this part of the book provide much more detail about particular tasks, such as using the IDE’s menus, customizing menus and toolbars, and using the Windows Forms Designer to build forms.