Visual Studio

Visual Studio is an integrated and comprehensive suite of development tools for building Web-based or Windows-based applications. You can use Visual Studio to build collaborative solutions that take advantage of the Windows Server System family of products (which includes Exchange Server and SQL Server) because Visual Studio and the Windows Server System are integrated.

Visual Studio .NET is the development tool for the .NET Framework; we'll discuss it in detail later in this chapter. Visual Studio .NET provides native support for creating and consuming XML Web services, the common language runtime (CLR), the .NET Framework, and .NET programming languages. Many of the examples in this book will be built with Visual Studio .NET.