Chapter 4: Community Content and VSTemplates

Microsoft® Visual Studio® was designed to be an upgradeable and evolving program. In this chapter, we'll show you how to use some of the new features of Visual Studio to make your programming more powerful by sharing code with other users.

Community Content

In the early hobbyist days of programming, people would often gather in small groups to share ideas about how to program or to share code. These user groups would often have a shared goal in a program that they needed to write. Maybe they wanted to write a program to balance their checkbooks, keep track of recipes, or maybe share software algorithms that would make software development easier and faster. This community of software developers still exists today, but because of tools such as the Internet, the community has grown to a global scale. Today, sites such as Microsoft's own GotDotNet.com, WindowsForms.com, and Asp.net, have sprung up, letting a user in Pittsburgh collaborate on a software project with a developer in Tokyo. You can also use the tools built into Visual Studio on the Community | Search menu to open the Microsoft Developer Network (MSDN®) help browser, where you can search for content.

Visual Studio makes collaboration between developers easier with tools designed specifically to allow you to share code and ideas. If you need help, simply go to one of your favorite programming community Web sites and make a request. Another user might have experience with the problem you are trying to solve and have some code that is similar to what you need. He or she can package the code and distribute it, either by sending the content to you directly through e-mail or by posting it to a Web site. Sharing code is the focus of the Community Content Installer—a tool that takes code created by another user and places it on your computer so that you can start using it right away.

Note 

Note The Content Installer also gives you an opportunity if you are in the business of selling components for Visual Studio. You could package controls for the Toolbox, code snippets, and other items, and then sell those components from your Web site. Customers can then use the Content Installer to install the components they purchased.