Chapter 1

Introduction to the IDE

WHAT’S IN THIS CHAPTER

• Configuring the Visual Studio IDE for Visual Basic development
• Understanding projects and solutions
• Creating a simple project
• Copying solutions

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INTRODUCING THE IDE

The chapters in the first part of this book describe the Visual Studio integrated development environment (IDE). They explain the most important windows, menus, and toolbars that make up the environment, and show how to customize them to suit your needs. They explain some of the tools that provide help while you are writing Visual Basic applications and how to use the IDE to debug programs.

Even if you are an experienced Visual Basic programmer, you should at least skim this material. The IDE is extremely complex and provides hundreds (if not thousands) of commands, menus, toolbars, windows, context menus, and other tools for editing, running, and debugging Visual Basic projects.

Even after you’ve read these chapters, you should periodically spend some time wandering through the IDE to see what you’ve missed. Every month or so, spend a few minutes exploring little-used menus and right-clicking things to see what their context menus contain. As you become a more proficient Visual Basic programmer, you will find uses for tools that you may have dismissed or not understood before.

This chapter explains how to get started using the IDE. It tells how to configure the IDE for different kinds of development. It explains Visual Basic projects and solutions, and shows how to create, run, and save new projects. This chapter is mostly an introduction to the chapters that follow. The other chapters in this part of the book provide much more detail about particular tasks, such as using the IDE’s menus, customizing menus and toolbars, and using the Windows Forms Designer to build forms.

DIFFERENT IDE APPEARANCES

Before you start reading about the IDE and viewing screen shots, it’s important to understand that the Visual Studio IDE is extremely customizable. You can move, hide, or modify the menus, toolbars, and windows; create your own toolbars; dock, undock, or rearrange the toolbars and windows; and change the behavior of the built-in text editors (change their indentation, colors for different kinds of text, and so forth).

To avoid confusion, you should probably not customize the IDE’s basic menus and toolbars too much. Removing the help commands from the Help menu and adding them to the Edit menu will only cause confusion later. Moving or removing commands will also make it more difficult to follow the examples in this and other books, and will make it more difficult to follow instructions given by others who might be able to help you when you have problems.

Instead of making drastic changes to the default menus and toolbars, hide the menus and toolbars that you don’t want and create new customized toolbars to suit your needs. Then you can find the original standard toolbars if you decide you need them later.

The screens shown in this book may not look exactly like the ones on your system for several other reasons as well. Visual Studio looks different on different operating systems. The figures in this book were taken on a computer running Windows 8 so they display the Windows 8 look and feel. Additionally, some commands may not behave exactly the same way on different operating systems.

Visual Studio will also look different depending on which version you have installed. The free Visual Basic 2012 Express Edition product has fewer tools than other editions such as the high-end Team Suite. The figures in this book were captured while using Team Suite, so if you have another version, you may not see all of the tools shown here. Menu items, toolbars, and other details may also be slightly different for different versions. Usually you can find moved items with a little digging through the menus and customizations.

Finally, you may be using different configuration settings from the ones used while writing this book. You can configure Visual Studio to use settings customized for developing projects using Visual Basic, C#, web tools, and other technologies. This book assumes your installation is configured for Visual Basic development, and the screen shots may look different if you have selected a different configuration. The following section says more about different IDE configurations and tells how you can select a particular configuration.

IDE CONFIGURATIONS

When you install it, Visual Studio asks you what kinds of development settings you want to use. The most obvious choice for a Visual Basic developer is Visual Basic Development Settings. This choice customizes Visual Studio to work more easily with Visual Basic, and is a good selection if you will focus on Visual Basic development.

Another reasonable choice is General Development Settings. This option makes Visual Studio behave more like Visual Studio 2003. It’s a good choice if you’re used to Visual Studio 2003, or if you expect to use other Visual Studio languages, such as C#, somewhat regularly because these settings are fairly effective for C# development and Visual Basic development.

This book assumes that you have configured Visual Studio for Visual Basic development. If you have chosen a different configuration, some of the figures in this book may look different from what you see on your screen. Some of the menu items available may be slightly different, or may appear in a different order. Usually, the items are available somewhere, but you may have to search a bit to find them.

If you later decide that you want to switch configurations, open the Tools menu and select Import and Export Settings to display the Import and Export Settings Wizard. Select the Reset All Settings option button and click Next. On the second page, tell the wizard whether to save your current settings and click Next. On the wizard’s final page (shown in Figure 1-1), select the type of configuration you want and click Finish. When the wizard is done, click Close.

FIGURE 1-1: Use the Tools menu’s Import and Export Settings command to change the Visual Studio configuration.

PROJECTS AND SOLUTIONS

Visual Studio groups files into projects and solutions. A project is a group of files that produces some specific output. This output may take many forms such as a compiled executable program, a dynamic-link library (DLL) of classes for use by other projects, or a control library for use on other Windows forms.

A solution is a group of one or more projects that should be managed together. For example, suppose that you are building a server application that provides access to your customer order database. You are also building a client program that each of your sales representatives will use to query the server application. Because these two projects are closely related, it might make sense to manage them in a single solution. When you open the solution, you get instant access to all the files in both projects.

Both projects and solutions can include associated files that are useful for building the application but that do not become part of a final compiled product. For example, a project might include the application’s proposal and architecture documents. These are not included in the compiled code, but it can be useful to associate them with the project so they are easy to find, open, and edit while you are working on the project.

When you open the project, Visual Studio lists those documents along with the program files. If you double-click one of these documents, Visual Studio opens the file using an appropriate application. For example, if you double-click a file with a .doc, .docm, or .docx extension, Visual Studio normally opens it with Microsoft Word.

To associate one of these files with a project or solution, right-click the project file at the top of the Solution Explorer (more on the Solution Explorer shortly). In the context menu that appears, select the Add command’s New Item entry, and use the resulting dialog box to select the file you want to add.

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