8
LESSON 1 GettinG Started with the ViSual Studio ide
FIGURE 13
The rest of this lesson deals with the features available in Visual
Studio, some of which are displayed in Figure 1-3. Before you launch
into an inventory of useful features, however, press F5 or open the
Debug menu and select Start Debugging to run your new program.
Figure 1-4 shows the result. Admittedly this first program isn’t very
fancy, but by the same token you didn’t need to do much to build it.
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 draggable title bar.
Minimize, maximize, and close buttons in the
upper-right corner.
A system menu in the upper-left corner that contains the commands Restore, Move, Size,
Minimize, Maximize, and Close.
An icon in the system taskbar.
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.
FIGURE 14
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Copying Projects
9
Unless you’re an absolute beginner to Windows, you probably take all of these features for granted,
but providing them is actually a lot of work. Not too long ago you would have had to write around
100 lines of code to handle these sorts of issues. Now Visual Studio automatically builds a form that
handles most of these 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 sizes) but usually you can ignore all of these issues and concentrate on your
particular application, not the Windows decorations.
A SUITABLE EXECUTABLE
Whenever you run a program in the IDE, Visual Studio builds an executable pro-
gram, normally in the project’s
binDebug subdirectory. You can run the executable
by simply double-clicking it, for example, in Windows Explorer.
That doesn’t mean the executable is suitable to run on any old computer. If you copy
that file to another computer, it won’t run unless the .NET Framework runtime
libraries have been installed there. If that computer has Visual Studio installed, you’re
all set, but if it doesn’t you’ll need to install the redistributable yourself.
To install these libraries, go to Microsoft’s download web page
www.microsoft.com/
downloads
and search for “.NET Framework redistributable.” Pick the version that
matches the one you’re using (version 4.0 if you’re using Visual C# 2010) and install it
on the target computer.
Now you can copy C# executables onto the system and run them.
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.
To make a copy, you might look in the 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 project pieces that it needs and
you’ll be left with nothing usable.
To correctly copy a project, find the solution or application folder in Windows Explorer and copy
the project’s entire directory hierarchy. Alternatively, you can compress the project directory into
a compressed or zipped file and then copy that. 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. Visual Studio will
re-create them when it needs them later.
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10
LESSON 1 GettinG Started with the ViSual Studio ide
Compressing a project into an archive is very useful because it keeps all of its files
together in a package. In particular, if you ever need to e-mail a project to someone
(for example, if you e-mail me at
[email protected] for help), you
can remove the
bin and obj directories, compress the project folder, and e-mail the
package as a single file. (If you’re sending the project to your instructor as part of
an assignment, rename the compressed file so it contains your name and the name
of the assignment, for example,
RodStephens6-1.zip.)
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 box, are so specialized that it may be years
before you need them.
Figure 1-5 shows the IDE with a simple project loaded with 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 impor-
tant 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 a form (place controls on it and set their properties) and write code
for the form, 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.
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Exploring the IDE
11
1
2
3
4
5
6
7
8
FIGURE 15
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 1-5) 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 1-5
is
Text, and it has the value First Name:.
7. Property Description — The property description gives you a reminder about the current
property’s purpose. In Figure 1-5, 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 1-5 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 auto-
matically 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 1-5, for example,
the Properties window, you’ll see three icons: a dropdown arrow (
), a thumbtack ( ), and an .
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12
LESSON 1 GettinG Started with the ViSual Studio ide
If you click the dropdown arrow (or right-click the window’s title bar), a menu appears with the fol-
lowing 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. I’ll say more about this shortly.
Dock as Tabbed Document
— The window becomes a tab in a tabbed area similar to #8 in
Figure 1-5. Unfortunately, it’s not always obvious which area will end up holding the win-
dow. 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. 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
in the 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 com-
mand does. Click the thumbtack to turn on auto-hiding. Expand the window and click the side-
ways thumbtack to turn off auto-hiding. (Turning auto-hiding off 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 1-6 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 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.
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