Chapter 13: Visual Studio 2005

Overview

In theory, it’s possible to work with Visual Basic without Visual Studio 2005. In practice, however, the two are rather inseparable; without a version of Visual Studio 2005, you’re forced to work from the command line to create project files by hand and make calls to the associated compilers and related tools necessary to build your application. Thus, while it is possible and, as shown in Chapter 17, sometimes even necessary, to work outside the Visual Studio 2005 Integrated Development Environment (IDE), Visual Studio 2005 is the preferred environment for developing Visual Basic applications.

With the release of Visual Studio 2005, Microsoft expanded on the different versions of Visual Studio available for use. Unlike the early versions, they’ve expanded what we’ll call the high-end and low-end packages associated with Visual Studio. At the low-cost end, currently free, is Visual Basic 2005 Express Edition. This tool enables you to build desktop applications with Visual Basic only. At the high end, Microsoft offers Visual Studio Team System, available only with a high-cost MSDN subscription, which includes many tools that help improve collaboration between developers.

Of course, the focus of this chapter is how Visual Studio enables you to use Visual Basic to build applications geared toward “better, faster, cheaper” business goals. To this end, we’ll be examining features of Visual Studio starting with those in the Core Visual Basic 2005 Express Edition and building up to the full Visual Studio Team Suite. Topics include the following:

• Versions of Visual Studio

• Project templates

• Project properties - application, compilation, debug, etc.

• Forms as classes

• Setting form properties

• IntelliSense, code expansion, and code snippets

• Selecting a runtime environment

• Debugging

• Recording and using macros

• Class Designer

• Visual Studio tools for Office

• Team System - Team Suite Client Tools

• Team Foundation Server - Team Explorer

This chapter provides an overview of many of the capabilities of Visual Studio 2005, with a brief introduction to the features available by using one of the more feature-rich versions of Visual Studio. The goal is to demonstrate how Visual Studio makes you, as a developer, more productive and successful.