Visual Studio .NET IDE

Visual Studio .NET IDE (Integrated Development Environment) is the Development Environment for all .NET based applications which comes with rich features. VS .NET IDE provides many options and is packed with many features that simplify application development by handling the complexities. Visual Studio .NET IDE is an enhancement to all previous IDE’s by Microsoft.

Important Features

One IDE for all .NET Projects

Visual Studio .NET IDE provides a single environment for developing all types of .NET applications. Application’s range from single windows applications to complex n-tier applications and rich web applications.

Option to choose from Multiple Programming Languages

You can choose the programming language of your choice to develop applications based on your expertise in that language. You can also incorporate multiple programming languages in one .NET solution and edit that with the IDE.

IDE is Customizable

You can customize the IDE based on your preferences. The My Profile settings allow you to do this. With these settings you can set the IDE screen the way you want, the way the keyboard behaves and you can also filter the help files based on the language of your choice.

Built-in Browser

The IDE comes with a built-in browser that helps you browse the Internet without launching another application. You can look for additional resources, online help files, source codes and much more with this built-in browser feature.

When we open VS .NET from Start->Programs->Microsoft Visual Studio .NET->Microsoft Visual Studio .NET the window that is displayed first is the Start Page which is shown below. The start Page allows us to select from the most recent projects (last four projects) with which we worked or it can be customized based on your preferences.

StartPage

The Integrated Development Environment (IDE) shown in the image below is what we actually work with. This IDE is shared by all programming languages in Visual Studio. You can view the toolbars towards the left side of the image along with the Solution Explorer window towards the right.

IDE

New Project Dialogue Box

The New Project dialogue box like the one in the image below is used to create a new project specifying it's type allowing us to name the project and also specify it's location on the disk where it is saved. The default location on the hard disk where all the projects are saved is C:\DocumentsandSettings\Administrator\MyDocuments\VisualStudioProjects.

New Project Dialogue

Following are different templates under Project Types and their use.

Windows Application: This template allows to create standard windows based applications.

Class Library: Class libraries are those that provide functionality similar to Active X and DLL by creating classes that access other applications.

Windows Control Library: This allows to create our own windows controls. Also called as User Controls, where you group some controls, add it to the toolbox and make it available to other projects.

ASP .NET Web Application: This allows to create web-based applications using IIS. We can create web pages, rich web applications and web services.

ASP .NET Web Service: Allows to create XML Web Services.

Web Control Library: Allows to create User-defined controls for the Web. Similar to user defined windows controls but these are used for Web.

Console Application: A new kind of application in Visual Studio .NET. They are command line based applications.

Windows Service: These run continuously regardless of the user interaction. They are designed for special purpose and once written, will keep running and come to an end only when the system is shut down.

Other: This template is to develop other kinds of applications like enterprise applications, database applications etc.