SUMMARY

The Visual Studio integrated development environment provides a huge number of tools for manipulating projects. Menus and toolbars contain hundreds if not thousands of commands for creating, loading, saving, and editing different kinds of projects and files.

This chapter described the most useful and important commands available in the IDE’s menus and toolbars. The kinds of menus, toolbars, and commands that are available depend on the type of window that currently has focus, in addition to the project’s current state. For example, the Format menu contains commands that arrange controls on a form so most of its commands are enabled only when you are using a Windows Forms Designer and you have controls selected.

This chapter also described important IDE windows such as the Error List, Solution Explorer, and Properties window. One of the most important of those windows is the Toolbox, which is used mostly to add controls and components to forms in the Windows Form Designer. Chapter 3, “Windows Forms Designer,” explains how to use the Windows Forms Designer to build the forms that make up most Windows applications.