James first started this website when learning Visual Basic back in 1999 whilst studying his GCSEs. The site grew steadily over the years while being run as a hobby - to a regular monthly audience of over half a million unique developers. In July '08 James left his job as Head of Development at a digital agency in London to focus his energies on developerFusion full-time.
The Visual Studio code editor provides full editing and intellisense capabilites
for all the .NET languages, including HTML, CSS, XML and ASP.net pages. The Design
view for HTML/ASP.net pages make it easy to design your layout, and you can now
specify a HTML schema for targetting specific browsers. ASP.net supports a number
of ways for seperating the HTML and C#/VB.net code, and VS.net does this by making
the asp.net page inherit a class from your project DLL. When dragging web forms
and user control elements on to an ASP.net page, VS.net automatically inserts
the necessary code for the aspx file as well as the inherited class. The Design
view does not quite match Dreamweaver in terms of editing capability, and does
have annoying limitations such as type of quotes you are using for specifying
tag values (for example, it can't display <img src="<% hello("fred")
%>">; Dreamweaver has no problem...).
For editing source code, VS now supports features such as code outlining, collapsing code and selection history which makes navigating your code far easier. C# also includes an XML Documentation feature which allows you to provide information about functions and classes through an XML structure which will automatically be used in the VS.NET IntelliSense. The toolbox now also includes a "Clipboard Ring", which captures the last 15 Copy/Cut operations. You can also save snippets of code to the toolbox for later re-use.
The new IDE
The layout and controls of a form in .NET is now controlled entirely by the
source code (making a nice change for VB developers). VS.NET's designer makes
it a simple matter for adding controls, automatically generating code behind
the scenes to create the layout you've created, whilst still making it simple
to tweak the code if you wish. For C# programmers, event handlers can be added
from the designer, and the code will automatically be created for tieing up the
event.
As we've come to expect, Visual Studio also comes with a whole host of templates and code wizards for the language of your choice. For example, the C# Class Wizard automatically creates the necessary code for using base classes and inheriting interfaces.
Creating a New Project
Comments