VS IDE

Morning!

It's a mild morning here and i have this cold that makes me sneeze now and then. With a towel on my lap to wipe the catarrh off my nose and clearing my throat intermittently, I write you this blog about the Visual Studio IDE.

Before you can fully enjoy the capabilities of VS (referring to Visual Studio) you'll need to understand its environment. I'll introduce you to the IDE (Integrated Development Environment) and the code structure of VS.NET. Just like VB 6 to BASIC, VB.NET has a different code structure to its predecessors. Although, if you are a VB 6 user getting to know the VB.NET, you may find that the IDE relates to you.

VB.NET comes with an IDE that is enhanced for effective coding and design. Depending on what platform you'll be working on, you can customise your IDE to suite your programming language need or application development need. That is, for example, you may want the IDE to be displayed to meet either your vb.net programming needs or your web development needs.

The Toolbox and other explorers/windows within VS now have the autohide fuction; this allows the objects to clear off the screen to give you more space in the Document Area (this is where you do your actual design or coding).

You also need to know that Visual Studio .NET groups your projects in a Solution (.sln). This imlies that you can have more than one (1) Project (.vbproj / .csproj), of different platforms, co-exist in a Solution. Any project removed from a solution is not actually deleted. Also you may decide to include an existing project from one Solution to another.

This is especially advantageous when developing applications of multiple platforms, which will require different teams to work with their programming language of specialty.

Take for instance, you and a friend are trying to develop this application for a school library. The school library wants to have an application running on the library's frontdesk that registers a borrowed or returned book just by student identification number. Then the application will pull students informaion from the school's web server. You are the "genius" in VB.NET but have no programming knowledge about servers. Now your friend creates ASP.NET 4 web sites in C# and is so grounded in server programming. And he says: "that's a brilliant idea my friend; let's develope a solution with two (2) projects in it - vb.net and c# projects."

Generally, the code window comes up when you double-click an object in Design view. You may also click on the form in the Solution Explorer; in the toolbox that appear at the top of the Solution Explorer press view code button.

VS .NET is so rooted in the OOP (Object Oriented Programming) concept. This implies that one object/class inherits properties from its parent class just like you inherit traits from your parents.

I hope by now you have some glimpse about VS and you have fell in love with it. Look out further for my blogs on VS as I expose you to many tricks you never knew or thought could be so awesome.

This cold is driving me nuts, so i'll simply say goodbye!