Summary

In this chapter, you have taken a dive into the versions and features of Visual Studio. This chapter has helped you to explore the new Visual Studio IDE and demonstrated how powerful the features of the IDE are, even in the freely available Visual Basic 2005 Express Edition. Following are some of the key points covered in this chapter:

• How to create projects and the different project templates available

• Code regions and how you can use them to conceal code

• Versions of Visual Studio 2005

• The properties and settings of your Visual Studio 2005 projects

• Running an application in Debug mode and working with breakpoints

• Building configurations and modifying the build configuration of your project

• The Class Designer

• Team System: Team Foundation Server and Team Suite

• Tools in Visual Studio 2005 Team Edition for Software Developers

• Automated unit tests

You’ve seen that Visual Studio 2005 is highly customizable and comes in a variety of flavors. Numerous windows can be hidden, docked, or undocked. They can be layered in tabs and moved within the IDE. Visual Studio contains many tools, including some that extend its core capabilities. Keep in mind that whether you are using Visual Basic 2005 Express Edition or Visual Studio 2005 Team Suite, the core elements associated with compiling your application are the same.