DIFFERENT IDE APPEARANCES

Before you start reading about the IDE and viewing screen shots, it’s important to understand that the Visual Studio IDE is extremely customizable. You can move, hide, or modify the menus, toolbars, and windows; create your own toolbars; dock, undock, or rearrange the toolbars and windows; and change the behavior of the built-in text editors (change their indentation, colors for different kinds of text, and so forth).

To avoid confusion, you should probably not customize the IDE’s basic menus and toolbars too much. Removing the help commands from the Help menu and adding them to the Edit menu will only cause confusion later. Moving or removing commands will also make it more difficult to follow the examples in this and other books, and will make it more difficult to follow instructions given by others who might be able to help you when you have problems.

Instead of making drastic changes to the default menus and toolbars, hide the menus and toolbars that you don’t want and create new customized toolbars to suit your needs. Then you can find the original standard toolbars if you decide you need them later.

The screens shown in this book may not look exactly like the ones on your system for several other reasons as well. Visual Studio looks different on different operating systems. The figures in this book were taken on a computer running Windows 8 so they display the Windows 8 look and feel. Additionally, some commands may not behave exactly the same way on different operating systems.

Visual Studio will also look different depending on which version you have installed. The free Visual Basic 2012 Express Edition product has fewer tools than other editions such as the high-end Team Suite. The figures in this book were captured while using Team Suite, so if you have another version, you may not see all of the tools shown here. Menu items, toolbars, and other details may also be slightly different for different versions. Usually you can find moved items with a little digging through the menus and customizations.

Finally, you may be using different configuration settings from the ones used while writing this book. You can configure Visual Studio to use settings customized for developing projects using Visual Basic, C#, web tools, and other technologies. This book assumes your installation is configured for Visual Basic development, and the screen shots may look different if you have selected a different configuration. The following section says more about different IDE configurations and tells how you can select a particular configuration.