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Visual Studio .NET Professional
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.
- Introduction
- Code Editor & Designer
- Debugging & Tools
- Conclusion
Code Editor & Designer
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
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Events coming up
-
Dec
9
GL.net Group Meeting - December 2009
Gloucester, United Kingdom
The beginning of this year holiday season will belong to mocks. Ronnie and Stephen will take us for a tour around exciting world of unit testing.
I use VS 2005 Team Edition in a big projekt. I find this IDE a step backward. Refactoring functions are painful (i.e. why, when I want to rename local variable in a function, it tries to rename all ocurrences in whole solution?) To add functions known from Eclipse (i.e. error highliting while coding - this is most useful to me, advanced finding usages, i.e. going direct to inheritors, super-fast finding of classes with a list of possible options while typing), you have to install separete Plugin. This is such a pity, while this consumes much memory. With big project, such as our, overall tool performance is bad. In my team are colleagues, which in other projects worked with Java and Eclipse. Their opinion is, that Eclipse is much better. Not to insult anybody. We use it for developing client-server application, where client is desktop (winforms) application. I've heard, that VS is very helpful when working with ASP. My company has no big experience with this technology, we used mainly Java so far.
However, at that page says
"Visual Studio .NET does not support Edit and Continue for Visual Basic or Visual C# code."
You can debug while your editing..
You have to change your options,
here's how to
http://msdn.microsoft.com/library/default.asp?url=/library/en-us/vsdebug/html/vxurfeditcontinuedebuggingoptionsdialogbox.asp
PS It's called Edit and Continue
I'm relatively new to .NET, I have programmed in VB 6 on and off for a few years and I find the main annoyance for me is the inability to enter code while debugging, you can't even comment out lines. I'm not even sure if you can skip over lines of code while debugging. I'm finding it very frustrating. Does anybody know of any work arounds. Another gripe is do people notice how difficult it is to find even the most basic information on Microsoft and other products online these days.
I began programming a year ago with Visual Basic 6, after becoming very much used to the VB6 interface, using VB.NET is a huge shock to the rituals. Visual Basic is like a totally new language. For example, something as simple as changing a Form's Back ground colour is now: Form1.BackColor = System.Drawing.Color.Red which is a lot more complex than what it is.
VB.NET is as good as a new language, but will give new programmers a boost in learning other languages, such as the hyped C#.
Personally, I still prefer VB6, but along with all the changes, VB.NET is a lot more powerfull. I've got both VS6 and VS.NET installed, so I can get the best of both worlds, although I think I will be a complete .NET programmer within the next few months.
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