Chapter 1. Introduction to the IDE
The chapters in the first part of this book describe the Visual Studio integrated development environment (IDE). They explain the most important windows, menus, and toolbars that make up the environment, and show how to customize them to suit your needs. They explain some of the tools that provide help while you are writing Visual Basic applications and how to use the IDE to debug programs.
Even if you are an experienced Visual Basic programmer, you should at least skim this material. The IDE is extremely complex and provides hundreds (if not thousands) of commands, menus, toolbars, windows, context menus, and other tools for editing, running, and debugging Visual Basic projects. Even if you have used the IDE for a long time, there are sure to be some features that you have overlooked.
These chapters describe some of the most important of those features, and you may discover something useful that you've never noticed before.
Even after you've read these chapters, you should periodically spend some time wandering through the IDE to see what you've missed. Every month or so, spend a few minutes exploring little-used ...
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