Professional C# 2005

Chapter 14. Visual Studio 2005

At this point you should be familiar with the C# language and almost ready to move on to the applied sections of the book, which look at how to use C# to program a variety of applications. Before doing that, however, you need to examine how you can use Visual Studio and some of the features provided by the .NET environment to get the best from your programs.

This chapter looks at what programming in the .NET environment means in practice. It covers Visual Studio, the main development environment in which you will write, compile, debug, and optimize your C# programs, and provides guidelines for writing good applications. Visual Studio is the main IDE used for everything from writing Web Forms, Windows Forms, XML Web services, and more. For more details on Windows Forms and how to write user interface code, see Chapter 23, "Windows Forms."

Working with Visual Studio 2005

Visual Studio 2005 is a fully integrated development environment. It is designed to make the process of writing your code, debugging it, and compiling it to an assembly to be shipped as easy as possible. What this means in practice is that Visual Studio gives you a very sophisticated multiple-document-interface application in which you can do just about everything related to developing your code. It offers these features:

• Text editor. Using this editor, you can write your C# (as well as Visual Basic 2005, J#, and C++) code. This text editor is quite sophisticated. For example, as you type, ...