47.1. General Build Options

Before you even get started on a project, you can modify some settings in the Options pages for Visual Studio 2008. These options apply to every project and solution that you open in the IDE, and as such can be used to customize your general experience when it comes to compiling your projects.

The first port of call for professional Visual Basic developers should be the General page of the Projects and Solutions group. By default, the Visual Basic setup of the IDE hides some of the build options from view, so the only way to show them is to activate the Show Advanced Build Configurations option.

When this is active, the IDE displays the Build Configuration options in the My Project pages, and the Build Configuration Manager menu command is also accessible. Other language environments don't need to do this, because these options are activated on startup (although you could certainly turn them off if you didn't want them cluttering your menus and pages).

The other option on this page relating to building your projects is whether or not to automatically show the Error List if compilation errors are encountered during the build process. By default, all language configurations have this option turned on.

The Build and Run options page (shown in Figure 47-1) in the Projects and Solutions group has many more options available to you to customize the way your ...

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