Chapter 1. Getting Started with the Visual Studio IDE
The Visual Studio integrated development environment (IDE) plays a central role in Visual Basic development. In this lesson you explore the IDE. You learn how to configure it for Visual Basic development, and you learn about some of the most useful IDE windows and what they do. When you finish this lesson, you'll know how to create a new project. It may not do much, but it will run and you'll be ready for the lessons that follow.
Note
Visual Studio is a development environment that you can use with several programming languages, including C#, Visual Basic, Visual C++, and F#. Visual Basic is a high-level programming language that can read inputs, calculate results, display outputs to the user, and perform other operations typical of high-level programming languages.
The .NET Framework also plays an important role in Visual Basic programs. It includes classes that make performing certain tasks easier, runtime tools that make it possible to execute Visual Basic programs, and other plumbing necessary to build and run Visual Basic programs.
Normally you don't need to worry about whether a feature is provided by Visual Studio, the Visual Basic language, or the .NET Framework. They all go together in this book, so for the purposes of this book at least you can ignore the difference.
INSTALLING VISUAL BASIC
Before you can use Visual Basic to write the next blockbuster first-person game, you need to install it, so if you haven't done so already, ...
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