Overview

When CMS 2002 was released, there was one very significant change in the product: direct integration with an integrated development environment (IDE). In this case, the IDE was Visual Studio .NET (VS.NET). This change in the product has had a great and profound effect on the way you develop solutions based on CMS. First and foremost, from a developer's perspective, you have everything you need to create a new site from within the IDE. Very few times will you have to leave the IDE to accomplish a task; and even in those instances when you do leave the IDE, Microsoft has provided access right from Visual Studio. In this chapter, we'll examine how Visual Studio integrates with CMS. In addition, we'll discuss how to create new template galleries and template gallery items (TGIs).