Free Downloadable Ebook on Visual Basic 2005 : Introducing Microsoft Visual Basic 2005 for Developers.pdf

Visual Studio 2005 Integrated Development Environment

Before .NET, there was Microsoft Visual Basic 6, one of the most popular and easy-to-use programming languages of all time. The simple reason for its success was that it allowed developers to be more productive than their counterparts working with other programming languages and development tools. Certainly the productivity benefits enjoyed by Visual Basic 6 developers came at the expense of limited language support. When Visual Basic .NET came along, it introduced a new programming architecture and features, such as full access to the platform, for building state-of-the-art applications. Visual Basic .NET was thus established as a first-class programming language. However, the promise of all that functionality and language support came at the expense of some productivity benefits Visual Basic developers had come to love and expect.

Microsoft Visual Studio 2005 contains a number of new enhancements, innovations, and advances to the development environment, offered with the singular objective of making Visual Basic .NET developers more productive than ever before. This chapter explores some of these features, and explains how you can make use of them as a developer to write code faster and more accurately.

Application: IDE Enhancements

This application demonstrates the Class Designer in the Visual Studio 2005 IDE, a tool for visually designing the class hierarchy in a Visual Basic .NET application.........more

Before examining the details of the application, let's first take a more general look at features that are either new or improved in the Visual Studio 2005 IDE.

Configuration Settings
If you have used previous versions of Visual Studio, you have probably spent some time customizing the development environment. You might have learned through some experimentation that you can specify the position of tool windows, or you might have found that menus and toolbars in Visual Studio are fully customizable. You can also configure keyboard mappings, project template types, Help filters, and so on. In fact, Visual Studio has always been designed for you to arrange elements of the IDE to best suit your individual development style.

The Options Dialog
The Options dialog shown in Figure 3-1 provides a broad array of settings categories for customizing the Visual Studio development environment. By default, the Options dialog displays the most common settings. To display all of the available settings, select the Show All Settings check box.Top