Chapter 1: IDE

Overview

This chapter describes the Visual Studio integrated development environment (IDE). It explains the most important windows, menus, and toolbars that make up the environment, and shows how to customize them to suit your personal preferences. It also explains some of the tools that provide help while you are writing Visual Basic applications.

Even if you are an experienced Visual Basic programmer, you should at least skim this material. The IDE is extremely complex and provides hundreds (if not thousands) of commands, menus, toolbars, windows, context menus, and other tools for editing, running, and debugging Visual Basic projects. Even if you have used the IDE for a long time, there are sure to be some features that you have overlooked. This chapter describes some of the most important of those features, and you may discover something useful that you’ve never noticed before.

Even after you’ve read this chapter, you should periodically spend some time wandering through the IDE to see what you’ve missed. Every month or so, spend a few minutes exploring the menus and right-clicking things to see what their context menus contain. As you become a more proficient Visual Basic programmer, you will find uses for tools that you may have previously dismissed or failed to understand.

It is important to remember that the Visual Studio IDE is extremely customizable. You can move, hide, or modify the menus, toolbars, and windows; create your own toolbars; dock, undock, or rearrange the toolbars and windows; and change the behavior of the built-in text editors (change their indentation, colors for different kinds of text, and so forth).

These capabilities enable you to display the features you need the most and hide those that are unnecessary for a particular situation. If you need to use the Properties window, you can display it. If you want to make room for a very wide form, you can make it short and wide, and move it to the bottom of the screen. If you have a collection of favorite tools and possibly some you have written yourself, you can put them all in one convenient toolbar. Or you can have several toolbars for working with code, forms in general, and database forms in particular.

This chapter describes the basic Visual Studio development environment as it is initially installed. Because Visual Studio is so flexible, your development environment may not look like the one described here. After you’ve moved things around a bit to suit your personal preferences, your menus and toolbars may not contain the same commands described here, and other windows may be in different locations or missing entirely.

To avoid confusion, you should probably not customize the IDE’s basic menus and toolbars too much. Removing the help commands from the Help menu and adding them to the Edit menu will only cause confusion later. Moving or removing commands will also make it more difficult to follow the examples in this and other books, and will make it more difficult to follow instructions given by others who might be able to help you when you have problems.

It’s less confusing to leave the menus more or less alone. Hide any toolbars you don’t want and create new customized toolbars to suit your needs. Then you can find the original standard toolbars if you decide you need them later. The section “Customize” later in this chapter has more to say about rearranging the IDE’s components.

Before you can understand how to use the IDE to manage Visual Basic projects and solutions, however, you should know what projects and solutions are.