Summary

The Visual Studio integrated development environment provides many tools for writing and debugging applications. It provides code snippets that make saving and reusing code easy. It lets you add, remove, and disable complex breakpoints that check conditions and hit counts, and that can perform customized actions. You can use regions and bookmarks to organize and find pieces of code, and you can step through the code line by line at execution time.

The IDE is extremely flexible. You can show, hide, and rearrange windows; add and remove items from menus and toolbars; and write macros to automate simple chores. Context menus attached to all sorts of objects provide help, tools, and other features that make sense for their particular objects and under different situations.

This chapter describes some of the most useful parts of the IDE, but listing every last nook and cranny would be tedious and not terribly useful. Rather than reading about the IDE further, you would be better off experimenting with it. Spend a few hours really examining all of the menus. Create a snippet with some replacement values and then insert it into your code. Step through a small program and try the Immediate and Command windows.

While you do all this, and while you’re developing real applications, right-click things to see what sort of context menus they provide. The IDE is packed with so many tools that it is sometimes hard to find the one you want. Because context menus are tied closely to the objects that you click to display them, they often provide more appropriate and focused commands than the toolbars or menus.

After you have used the IDE for a while and are comfortable with it, customize it to match your preferences. Build custom toolbars and menus to make using your favorite tools easier. When you have the tools that you use most at your fingertips, you will see just how productive Visual Studio can be.

After you have become familiar with the IDE, you can start building applications. One way to begin is to design the application’s user interface: the forms, labels, text boxes, and other controls that the user sees and manipulates to control the application. Chapter 2 describes controls in general terms. It explains what controls are, how you can add them to a form, and how you can control and interact with them at design time and runtime.