Learning C# 3.0

Menus

The menus provide access to many of the commands and capabilities of C# Express 2008. The more commonly used menu commands are duplicated with toolbar buttons for ease of use.

The menus and toolbars are context-sensitive, meaning that the available selection depends on what part of the IDE is currently selected, and what activities are expected or allowed. For example, if the current active window is a code-editing window for a console application such as Hello World, the top-level menu commands are File, Edit, View, Refactor, Project, Build, Debug, Data, Tools, Test (only in the full Visual Studio), Window, and Help.

Many of the menu items have keyboard shortcuts, listed adjacent to the menu item itself. These are composed of one or more keys (referred to as a chord), pressed simultaneously. Shortcut keys can be a huge productivity boost because you can use them to perform common tasks quickly, without removing your hands from the keyboard, but it’s really a matter of personal preference.

The following sections describe some of the more important menu items and their submenus, focusing on those aspects that are interesting and different from common Windows commands.

The File Menu

The File menu provides access to a number of file-, project-, and solution-related commands. Many of these commands are context-sensitive.

As in most Windows applications, the New menu item creates new items to work on, the Open item opens existing items, and the Save item saves your work. One item you ...