User-Customizable Profiles | Visual BasicR. NET Unleashed


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	Visual Basic .NET Unleashed By Paul Kimmel
	Table of Contents

	Chapter 1. Using the Unified Visual Studio IDE

User -Customizable Profiles

When you open Visual Studio .NET for the first time, the first thing you will notice is that there is no separate menu item to start Visual Basic. To create a Visual Basic application, you will need to choose Start, Programs, Microsoft Visual Studio .NET 7.0, and then Microsoft Visual Studio .NET 7.0. (Henceforth, I will refer to this as starting Studio or Visual Basic.)

When you run Studio for the first time, you will be presented with the Start Page, an HTML page that plays the role of IDE navigator. The menus are enabled, but before you start programming you will want to do a little housekeeping first. If you accidentally close the Start page, you can reopen it by choosing Help, Show Start Page in Studio.

The Start Page is presented first because Microsoft has unified Visual Studio to be a single environment for all .NET development. A unified IDE is indicative of the interoperability between .NET languages.

Visual Studio .NET includes profile management. Selecting My Profile on the Start Page allows you to define a user profile, which basically means that you can make Visual Studio look and respond as close to what you might expect from a Visual Basic environment. Setting your profile to Visual Basic as a first step makes your environment behave as consistently with Visual Basic 6 as possible, allowing for the fact that there are significant changes in VB .NET.

To customize the user profile for Visual Basic users, perform the following steps:

If the Start Page isn't shown, choose Help, Show Start Page from the Studio Help menu.
In the left column beneath Get Start, select My Profile. (The Start Page is an HTML page, so work with it as such. Everything is point-and-click hyperlinks .)
In the Profile combo box, select Visual Basic Developer. (If the remaining combo boxes contain the values you wantreferences to a Visual Basic 6 style configurationyou can skip the remaining steps.)
In the Keyboard Scheme combo box, select Visual Basic 6.
In the Window Layout combo box, select Visual Basic 6.
In the Help Filter combo box, select Visual Basic and Related.
For the Show Help radio buttons , select whichever you prefer; I chose Internal Help.
For the At Startup Show combo box, select Show Start Page, or you may elect to have Studio open the New Project dialog box just as VB6 does.

At this point you can explore some of the other Start Page options, but you are ready to open your first project. Let's create a simple console application while we look at some of the project features.


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