Preface

Just after they started building platforms that required development, Microsoft began building tools to perform that development. The authors of this book are personally familiar with edit , Programmer's Workbench, windbg , QuickC, QuickBasic, Visual C++, Visual Basic, Visual Interdev, Visual J++, and the general-purpose, all-time favorite, Notepad.

We've come a long way. This book is meant to provide the information that you need to get the most out of Microsoft's latest, and certainly greatest, integrated development environment (IDE): Visual Studio .NET (VS.NET). While the ".NET" portion of the name designates VS.NET's role in providing a full-featured IDE for all forms of .NET development, all of the major functions that Microsoft has provided in past IDEs are also supplied.