Launching Visual Studio

As with any Windows application, the Visual Studio 2005 Setup program associates application solution files (.sln) and several other extensions (like .xml, .vb, .cs, and others) with the DevEnv.Exe Visual Studio executable. Except for the Express Edition, Visual Studio 2005 can be found in Start | Programs | Microsoft Visual Studio 2005 | Microsoft Visual Studio 2005. The Express edition is installed in the root Start | Programs directory.

When Visual Studio Standard Edition or better starts for the first time, if a prior installation of a version of Visual Studio (.NET or 2005) is not found, it displays a dialog that prompts you to choose the type of "developer activity". While strangely worded, basically they're asking if you want Visual Studio to behave and be configured for one of five types of "activity" as shown in Figure 4.8.

Figure 4.8. First-time execution of Visual Studio 2005 queries for "development activity".

Once you make a selection, "activity"-specific keyboard layout schemas are installed and features are made visible. No, this selection is not cast in stone, as you can load pre-configured configurations or customize a configuration and save it for later reuseand you're probably going to want to do just that.

Installing the Visual Studio 2005 Image Library

For reasons that escape us, Visual Studio setup does not install any icon files that developers can use in their applications. These are included on Standard or better edition DVDs in compressed form and copied to your system, but not placed anywhere you easily find themthey're hidden at C:\Program Files\Microsoft Visual Studio 8\Common7\VS2005ImageLibrary. This path contains a compressed file VS2005ImageLibrary.zip that should be extracted to a convenient place on your development system.