Chapter 1: Exploring the Visual Studio Integrated Development Environment

Chapter 1

Exploring the Visual Studio Integrated Development Environment

After Completing this chapter, you will be able to:

• Start Microsoft Visual Studio 2005.

• Use the Visual Studio Integrated Development Environment.

• Open and run a Microsoft Visual Basic program.

• Change property settings.

• Move, resize, dock, and auto hide tool windows.

• Open a Web browser within Visual Studio.

• Use new Help commands and customize Help.

• Customize Integrated Development Environment settings to match this book's step-by-step instructions.

• Save your changes, and exit Visual Studio.

Microsoft Visual Basic 2005 is an important upgrade and enhancement of the popular Visual Basic development system and an iterative upgrade of the Microsoft Visual Basic .NET 2003 software. This chapter gives you the skills you need to quickly and efficiently get up and running with the Visual Studio 2005 Integrated Development Environment (IDE)—the place where you will write Visual Basic programs. You should read this chapter whether you are new to Visual Basic programming or you have used previous versions of Visual Basic or Visual Studio.

In this chapter, you'll learn how to start Visual Studio 2005 and how to use the IDE to open and run a simple program. You'll learn the essential Visual Studio menu commands and programming procedures; you'll open and run a simple Visual Basic program named Music Trivia; you'll change a programming setting called a property; and you'll practice moving, sizing, docking, and auto hiding tool windows. You'll also learn how to open a Web browser within Visual Studio, how to get more information by using online Help, and how to exit the development environment and save your changes.

Upgrade Notes: Migrating Visual Basic 6 Code to Visual Basic 2005

Microsoft Visual Basic 6.0 has been an extremely successful product. Even though Visual Basic 6 was released in 1998, many software developers, including a large number of professional programmers who work outside of North America, continue to use this tool to develop and modify applications for Microsoft Windows. If you are thinking about upgrading to Visual Basic 2005 but are most comfortable with the commands and features in Visual Basic 6, there are some important product features and migration tips that you should be aware of. To help programmers who are moving from Visual Basic 6, I plan to start each chapter of this book with a sidebar that highlights the feature changes that you should be aware of. (If you are not upgrading from Visual Basic 6, simply skip the sidebar.)

Remember that you don't need any programming experience to learn Visual Basic 2005 using this book. But if you have some Visual Basic 6 knowledge already, you will benefit from an executive summary spelling out the differences. So to begin with, here is my list of upgrade notes for Chapter 1:

• Visual Basic is now a full member of Visual Studio—it shares the Visual Studio development environment with Microsoft Visual C++ 2005, Microsoft Visual C# 2005, Microsoft Visual J# 2005, and several other programming tools. Although Visual Basic, Visual C++, Visual C#, and Visual J# are still different programming languages, they share the same IDE.

• As part of its new development environment, Visual Studio offers a new Start Page pane, which shows recently used projects and lets you open new or existing source files. Additional links in the Start Page pane provide access to Visual Studio Web sites, news and articles about Visual Studio programming, and contacts within the Visual Studio development community.

• The Visual Studio development environment contains several new and modified programming tools. The Project window is now called Solution Explorer, and help information is delivered through a new tool called Microsoft Document Explorer. You'll find that the Toolbox has changed quite a bit—it's now subdivided into several functional categories, such as Common Controls, Components, and Data.

• Most of the programming tool windows (including the Toolbox) have an auto hide feature that hides the tool as a tab when it isn't needed. Auto hiding tools saves you design and coding space within the development environment.

• Projects are now saved in a different way. You give your project a name before you create it, and the files that you create remain in memory for testing and debugging until you choose to save (or discard) them. The project itself is spread over several files and folders—even more than in Visual Basic 6. In Visual Basic 6, programs that are made up of multiple projects are called project groups; now they're called solutions.

• To upgrade Visual Basic 6 applications to Visual Basic 2005, you can use a tool called the Visual Basic Upgrade Wizard, which starts automatically when you open a Visual Basic 6 program in Visual Studio. The Upgrade Wizard isn't a complete solution for migrating Visual Basic 6 applications. However, the wizard efficiently handles most repetitive code changes and can even swap Visual Basic 6 controls for Visual Studio 2005 controls on forms. In addition to this upgrade tool, which prepares a complete migration report, you can also use the Upgrade Visual Basic 6 command on the Visual Studio Tools menu to quickly translate a line of Visual Basic 6 code and insert it into a Visual Basic 2005 project.

• If you open Visual Basic .NET 2002 or 2003 projects in Visual Studio 2005, they are converted automatically via the Visual Studio Conversion Wizard.