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Open up Microsoft Visual Studio.NET 7.0 and you will see a starting window similar to what is shown in Figure A-1.
What you see on default startup is the main window with an HTML page that can help you navigate among various resources, open or create projects, and change your profile information. (If you close the start page, you can get it back anytime from the menu Help Show Start Page.) Clicking on My Profile will bring up a profile page on which you can change various settings. There is a standard profile for "typical" work in Visual Studio ("Visual Studio Developer" profile), and special ones for various languages. Since Visual Studio.NET is the unification of many development environments, programmers used to one particular previous environment may prefer a particular keyboard scheme, window layout, and so on. For example, if you choose the profile "Visual Basic Developer," you will get the Visual Basic 6 keyboard scheme. In this book we will use all the defaults, so go back to the profile "Visual Studio Developer" if you made any changes. See Figure A-2.
To gain an appreciation of some of the diverse features in Visual Studio.NET, open up the Bank console solution in the AppA directory for this Appendix (File Open Solution..., navigate to the Bank directory, and open the file Bank.sln ). You will see quite an elaborate set of windows . See Figure A-3.
Starting from the left are icons for the Server Explorer and the Toolbox, followed by the main window area, which currently is just a gray area. Underneath the main window is the Output Window, which shows the results of builds and so on. Continuing our tour, on the top right is the Solution Explorer, which enables you to conveniently see all the files in a "solution," which may consist of several "projects." On the bottom right is the Properties window, which lets you conveniently edit properties on forms for Windows applications. The Properties window is very similar to the Properties Window in Visual Basic.
From the Solution Explorer you can navigate to files in the projects. In turn , double-click on each of Account.cs and Bank.cs, the two source files in the Bank project. Text editor windows will be brought up in the main window area. Across the top of the main window are horizontal tabs to quickly select any of the open windows. Visual Studio.NET allows you to select the window to show from the Windows menu. Figure A-4 shows the open source files with the horizontal tabs.
Visual Studio comes with many different toolbars. You can configure which toolbars you wish displayed, and you can drag toolbars to position them to where you find them most convenient . You can also customize toolbars by adding or deleting buttons that correspond to different commands.
To specify which toolbars are displayed, bring up the menu View Toolbars. You can also right-click in any empty area of a toolbar. There will be a check mark next to the toolbars which are currently displayed. By clicking on an item on this menu you can make the corresponding toolbar button appear or disappear. For your work in this book add the toolbars,
Build
Debug
We want to make sure that the "Start Without Debugging" command is available on the Debug toolbar. If it is not already on your Debug toolbar (it is a red exclamation point), you can add it by the following procedure, which can be used to add other commands to toolbars.
Select menu Tools Customize... to bring up the Customize dialog.
Select the Commands tab.
In Categories, select Debug, and in Commands select Start Without Debugging. See Figure A-5.
Drag the selected command onto the Debug toolbar, positioning it where you desire . Place it to the immediate right of the wedge -shaped Start button.
Close the Customize dialog.
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