Getting Started with the Visual Studio IDE

The Visual Studio integrated development environment (IDE) plays a central role in C# development. In this lesson you explore the IDE. You learn how to configure it for C# development, and you learn about some of the more useful of the IDE's windows and what they do. When you finish this lesson, you'll know how to create a new project. It may not do much, but it will run and will prepare you for the lessons that follow.

Installing C#

Before you can use C# to write the next blockbuster first-person Xbox game, you need to install it. So if you haven't done so already, install C#.

You can install one of the free Express Editions at www.microsoft.com/express/Windows. As I write this, that page lists versions of Visual Studio 2015, but when you visit that page it should let you install the latest version. (I'm using a preview build of Visual Studio 2015 to write the programs that go with this book.)

Several versions are available on that page, so be sure you pick the right one. Here's a quick summary of some of the versions that may be available:

• Community—This version lets you build web, Windows Store (including tablet and phone apps), Windows Desktop, Android, and iOS applications. This is probably the best version for you to download.
• Express for Web—This version focuses on building websites.
• Express for Windows—This version focuses on building Windows Phone and Windows Store apps.
• Express for Windows Desktop—This version focuses on desktop applications. You run these from the Windows desktop, not the start screen.
• Team Foundation Server Express—This edition is for people working in teams. This includes tools that you don't need right now and that can provide extra opportunities for confusion, so skip this version. (If you don't think things are confusing enough, e-mail me and I'll suggest some more confusing topics for you to study.)

The Community Edition includes tools to get started building any of these kinds of applications, so it's a good choice. You may never use it to build websites or iOS applications, but having those abilities installed won't hurt you.

The Express Editions are only intended to get you started, but they're seriously powerful so you probably won't need anything else for quite a while. I've been happily using Express Editions for about two decades.

If you think you need some other version of Visual Studio (for example, you're working on a big project and you need test management, source code control, and other team programming tools), go to msdn.microsoft.com/vcsharp and install the version that's right for you.

All of these are big installations (5 or 6 GB), so they could take a while. While a constant supply of cookies, caffeine, and conversation will help you pass the time more quickly, the other customers won't thank you if you hammer the Starbucks Wi-Fi for 12 straight hours. Be sure you have a reasonably fast connection before you start.

Configuring the IDE

When you first run Visual Studio, the dialog shown in Figure 1.1 appears to let you configure the IDE. (You may also see a few other dialogs before that point asking you to log in to your Microsoft profile. You can create one if you don't already have one.)

The dialog lets you pick settings for general development, Visual Basic, Visual C#, and so forth. Because you're going to be focusing on C# development, select that option.

The dialog also lets you pick a color scheme. Pick the one you think you'll like best (admittedly without getting to try them out) and click Start Visual Studio. (Then be ready to wait again because the initial configuration can take a while.)

If you ever want to switch to different settings (for example, if you initially picked the Dark colors but then discovered that they give you a headache), you can always change them later.

To change the settings, open the Tools menu and select Import and Export Settings to display the Import and Export Settings Wizard. You can use this tool to save your current settings, reload previously saved settings, or restore the settings to their default values.

To reset the settings, select the Reset All Settings option on the wizard's first page and click Next.

On the next page, indicate whether you want to save your current settings. When you've made your choice, click Next to display the page shown in Figure 1.2. Select the Visual C# choice and click Finish.

Then sit back and wait. Or better still, go get something to drink because this could take a while. Visual Studio has a lot of settings to reset, and it could take several minutes depending on how fast your computer is. (And how busy your computer is playing YouTube videos.)

Building Your First Program

Now that you've installed C#, you're ready to build your first program. Launch Visual Studio by double-clicking its desktop icon, selecting it from the system's Start menu, finding it with the Windows Search tool, or doing whatever you do to run programs on your version of Windows.

When it starts, Visual Studio should look more or less like Figure 1.3. You can use the links in the center pane to get more information about Visual Studio, .NET, Azure, and whatever else Microsoft thinks is important today.

You can use the links in the left pane to create a new project or open an existing project. You can also create a new project by opening the File menu, expanding the New submenu, and selecting Project. Or if you're in a hurry to create your first project, just press Ctrl+Shift+N.

All of those methods display the New Project dialog shown in Figure 1.4. Expand the Visual C# project types folder on the left and select the template for the type of project that you want to build on the right. For most of this book, that will be a Visual C# Windows Forms Application.

After you select a project type, you need to enter several pieces of information:

• Name—This is the application's name. Visual Studio creates a folder with this name to hold the program's files. It also uses this name for some key values in the project.
• Location—This is where you want Visual Studio to put the project's folder.
• Solution Name—If the Create Directory for Solution box is checked (which it is by default), Visual Studio creates a folder with this name at the location you entered. It then places the application's folder inside the solution's folder.

So if the Create Directory for Solution box is checked, you get a filesystem layout that looks like this:

1. SolutionFolder
   1. SolutionFiles
   2. ApplicationFolder
      1. ApplicationFiles

If the Create Directory for Solution box is not checked, you get a filesystem layout that looks like this:

1. ApplicationFolder
   1. ApplicationFiles

The applications you build in this book are single programs so they don't really need to be inside a separate solution folder. Most of the time, I uncheck the Create Directory for Solution box to keep my filesystem simpler.

If you open the New Project dialog while you have another project open, you'll see an additional dropdown that lists the choices Create New Solution and Add to Solution. The first choice closes the current solution and creates a new one. The second choice adds the new application to the solution you currently have open. Normally you'll want to create a new solution.

After you display the New Project dialog and enter a Name, Location, and Solution Name, click OK. The result should look like Figure 1.5.

The rest of this lesson deals with the features available in Visual Studio, some of which are displayed in Figure 1.5. Before you launch into an inventory of useful features, however, open the Debug menu and select Start Debugging. Or if you're in a hurry, just press F5.

Your first program should look like Figure 1.6. Admittedly this first program isn't very fancy, but by the same token you didn't need to do much to build it. All you did was press Ctrl+Shift+N and then F5!

This first program may not seem terribly impressive, but there's a lot going on behind the scenes. C# has built a form with a bunch of useful features, including:

• A resizable border and a draggable title bar.
• Working minimize, maximize, and close buttons in the upper-right corner.
• A system menu in the upper-left corner that contains working Restore, Move, Size, Minimize, Maximize, and Close commands.
• An icon in the system taskbar that lets you minimize, restore, and close the program.
• The ability to use Alt+Tab and Flip3D (Win+Tab) to move between the application and others.
• Other standard window behaviors. For example, if you double-click the form's title bar it maximizes (or restores if it is already maximized), and if you press Alt+F4, the form closes.

Unless you're an absolute beginner to Windows, you probably take all of these features for granted, but providing them is actually a huge amount of work. Not too long ago you would have had to write around 100 lines of code to provide a subset of those features. Now Visual Studio automatically builds a form that handles most of the details for you.

You can still get in and change the way things work if you want to (for example, you can set a form's minimum and maximum allowed sizes), but usually you can ignore all of those issues and concentrate on your particular application instead of the Windows decorations.

Copying Projects

Sometimes you may want to copy a project. For example, you might want to save the current version and then make a new one to try things out. Or you may want to give a copy of the project to a friend or your programming instructor so he or she can tell you why its New button makes the program exit.

You might look in Visual Studio's File menu and see the Copy As commands. Don't be tempted! Those commands copy single files, not the entire project. Later when you try to open one of those files, you'll discover that Visual Studio cannot find all of the other pieces that it needs and you'll be left with nothing usable.

To correctly copy a project, copy the entire solution or application folder and its directory hierarchy. Alternatively, you can compress the project directory and then copy the compressed file. Just be sure that whatever copying method you use brings along all of the project's files.

Note that you can delete the bin and obj subdirectories if you like to save space. Those directories contain files that Visual Studio creates when it loads and builds a program, and it will re-create them whenever it needs them later.

You can also delete the .vs directory, which contains user settings. Unfortunately that directory is hidden by default so it may be hard to find. To make File Explorer show you hidden files, open the Control Panel, click Appearance and Personalization, and select Folder Options. On the View tab, select Show Hidden Files and Folders, and then click OK. Now you can see the .vs directory to delete it.

Exploring the IDE

The Visual Studio IDE contains a huge number of menus, toolbars, windows, wizards, editors, and other components to help you build applications. Some of these, such as the Solution Explorer and the Properties window, you will use every time you work on a program. Others, such as the Breakpoints window and the Connect to Device dialog, are so specialized that it may be years before you need them.

Figure 1.7 shows the IDE with a simple project loaded and some of the IDE's most important pieces marked. The following list describes those pieces.

1. Menus—The menus provide all sorts of useful commands. Exactly which commands are available, which are enabled, and even which menus are visible depends on what kind of editor is open in the editing area (#4). Some particularly useful menus include File (opening old projects and creating new ones), View (finding windows), Project (adding new forms and other items to a project), Debug (build, run, and debug the project), and Format (arrange controls on a form).
2. Toolbars—The toolbars provide shortcuts for executing commands similar to those in the menus. Use the Tools menu's Customize command to determine which toolbars are visible.
3. Solution Explorer—The Solution Explorer lists the files in the project. One of the most important is Form1.cs, which defines the controls and code for the form named Form1. If you double-click a file in the Solution Explorer, the IDE opens it in the editing area.
4. Editing Area—The editing area displays files in appropriate editors. Most often you will use this area to design forms (place controls on them and set control properties) and write code for forms, but you can also use this area to edit other files such as text files, bitmaps, and icons.
5. Toolbox—The Toolbox contains controls and components that you can place on a form. Select a tool and then click and drag to put a copy of the tool on the form. Notice that the Toolbox groups controls in tabs (All Windows Forms, Common Controls, Containers, Menus & Toolbars, and so on) to make finding the controls you need easier.
6. Properties Window—The Properties window lets you set control properties. Click a control on the Form Designer (shown in the editing area in Figure 1.7) to select it, or click and drag to select multiple controls. Then use the Properties window to set the control(s) properties. Notice that the top of the Properties window shows the name (label1) and type (System.Windows.Forms.Label) of the currently selected control. The currently selected property in Figure 1.7 is Text, and it has the value First Name:. You'll spend a lot of time working with the Properties window.
7. Property Description—The property description gives you a reminder about the current property's purpose. In Figure 1.7, it says that the Text property gives the text associated with the control. (Duh!)
8. Other Windows—This area typically contains other useful windows. The tabs at the bottom let you quickly switch between different windows.

Figure 1.7 shows a fairly typical arrangement of windows, but Visual Studio is extremely flexible so you can rearrange the windows if you like. You can hide or show windows, make windows floating or docked to various parts of the IDE, make windows part of a tab group, and make windows automatically hide themselves if you don't need them constantly.

If you look closely at the right side of the title bar above one of the windows in Figure 1.7 (for example, the Properties window), you'll see three icons: a dropdown arrow (), a thumbtack (), and an X ().

If you click the dropdown arrow (or right-click the window's title bar), a menu appears with the following choices:

• Float—The window breaks free of wherever it's docked and floats above the IDE. You can drag it around and it will not re-dock. To make it dockable again, open the menu again and select Dock.
• Dock—The window can dock to various parts of the IDE. (This is kind of fun and I'll say more about it shortly.)
• Dock as Tabbed Document—The window becomes a tab in a tabbed area similar to #8 in Figure 1.7. Unfortunately, it's not always obvious which area will end up holding the window. To make the window a tab in a specific tabbed area, make it dockable and drag it onto a tab (described shortly).
• Auto Hide—The window shrinks itself to a small label stuck to one of the IDE's edges and its thumbtack icon turns sideways () to indicate that the window is auto-hiding. If you float the mouse over the label, the window reappears. As long as the mouse remains over the expanded window, it stays put, but if you move the mouse off the window, it auto-hides itself again (like a cockroach when you turn on the lights). Select Auto Hide again or click the sideways thumbtack to turn off auto-hiding. Auto-hiding gets windows out of the way so you can work in a bigger editing area.
• Hide—The window disappears completely. To get the window back, you'll need to find it somewhere in the bewildering assortment of menus. You can find many of the most useful windows in the View menu, the View menu's Other Windows submenu, and the Debug menu's Windows submenu.

The thumbtack in a window's title bar works just like the dropdown menu's Auto Hide command does. Click the thumbtack to turn on auto-hiding. Expand the window and click the sideways thumbtack to turn off auto-hiding. (Turning off auto-hiding is sometimes called pinning the window.)

The () symbol in the window's title bar hides the window just like the dropdown menu's Hide command does.

In addition to using a window's title bar menu and icons, you can drag windows into new positions. As long as a window is dockable or part of a tabbed window, you can grab its title bar and drag it to a new position.

As you drag the window, the IDE displays little drop targets to let you dock the window in various positions. If you move the window so the mouse is over a drop target, the IDE displays a translucent blue area to show where the window will land if you drop it. If you drop when the mouse is not over a drop target, the window becomes floating.

Figure 1.8 shows the Properties window being dragged in the IDE. The mouse is over the right drop target above the editing area so, as the translucent blue area shows, dropping it there would dock the window to the right side of the editing area. The picture is kind of messy, but it's not too hard to see what's going on if you give it a try.

The drop area just to the left of the mouse represents a tabbed area. If you drop on this kind of ­target, the window becomes a tab in that area.

Try It

In this Try It, you prepare for later work throughout the book. You locate web resources that you can use when you have questions or run into trouble. You create and run a program, explore the project's folder hierarchy, and make a copy of the project. You also get a chance to experiment a bit with the IDE, displaying new toolbars, moving windows around, and generally taking the IDE for a test drive and kicking the tires.

Exercises

1. Build a solution that contains two projects. (Create a project named Project1. Check the Create Directory for Solution box and name the solution TwoProjects. Then open the File menu, expand the Add submenu, and select New Project to add a new project named Project2.)
2. This lesson explains only a tiny fraction of the ways you can customize Visual Studio. Try another one by making your own toolbar. Select the Tools menu's Customize command. On the Toolbars tab, click the New button, and name the new toolbar MyTools. On the Commands tab, select the Toolbar radio button and then select the new toolbar from the dropdown list. Now use the Add Commands button to add some commands to the toolbar.
3. This lesson also describes only a few of the windows Visual Studio offers. Use the menus to find and display the Output, Immediate, Error List, and Task List windows. Put them all in tabs at the bottom of Visual Studio (#8 in Figure 1.7).
4. Some tools are available only when Visual Studio is in a certain state. Look in the Debug menu's Windows submenu. Then start the program and look there again. Most of those windows are useful only when the program is running and you are debugging it. (I talk about some of them in later lessons.)
5. [WPF] Create a new WPF application. Run it side by side with a Windows Forms application. What are the differences? (Hint: There shouldn't be many and they should be cosmetic. You learn about more important but less obvious differences in later lessons.)