Professional ASP.NET 2.0 Special Edition

Chapter 2. Visual Studio 2005

When you use ASP.NET 2.0, I recommend you also work with Visual Studio 2005—the latest IDE from Microsoft—to facilitate building .NET components and applications. Visual Studio 2005, building on Visual Studio .NET 2003, provides one of the best development environments for coding your ASP.NET applications.

When learning a new programming language or technology, you spend a lot of time learning the details of the language, as well as how it is structured and used. You must also learn about the environment in which you will code this new language or technology. Understanding the environment is just as important as understanding the programming language itself.

In the past, it seemed that Microsoft had just as many development environments as it had languages or technologies. For example, before the introduction of Visual Studio .NET 2002, Web development required one environment, Visual Basic development another, and C++ development yet another. You had to choose the appropriate development environment for the specific type of programming you were trying to accomplish. With the release of the new Visual Studio Integrated Development Environments (IDEs), you can now build all the possible .NET classes, components, and applications from a single environment—Visual Studio!

Visual Studio 2005 enables you to build any type of .NET component or application. When you use this tool, you can choose any of the Microsoft .NET-compliant languages for building your applications; ...