Preface
Just after they started building platforms that required development, Microsoft began building tools to perform that development. The authors of this book are personally familiar with edit, Programmer’s Workbench, windbg, QuickC, QuickBasic, Visual C++, Visual Basic, Visual Interdev, Visual J++, and the general-purpose, all-time favorite, Notepad.
We’ve come a long way. This book is meant to provide the information that you need to get the most out of Microsoft’s latest, and certainly greatest, integrated development environment (IDE): Visual Studio .NET (VS.NET). While the “.NET” portion of the name designates VS.NET’s role in providing a full-featured IDE for all forms of .NET development, all of the major functions that Microsoft has provided in past IDEs are also supplied.
Audience
This book is for absolutely anyone doing development in Windows at all. If you’re an MFC, C++, STL, ATL, COM, Win32, Visual Basic, C#, HTML, XML, ASP.NET, database, web application, web service, Windows Service, standalone client, or component programmer targeting Windows or the Windows variants (i.e., Windows CE or the PocketPC), VS.NET is calling your name, and this book was written for you.
This book is broken up into two major sections. The first section is about getting the most out of VS.NET as it comes out of the box, including the following topics:
Solutions and projects
Files and the various file editors
Debugging
Web projects
Database projects
Setup projects
The second section is about extending ...