Chapter 15
Visual Studio 2008
At this point, you should be familiar with the C# language and almost ready to move on to the applied sections of the book, which cover how to use C# to program a variety of applications. Before doing that, however, you need to examine how you can use Visual Studio and some of the features provided by the .NET environment to get the best from your programs.
This chapter explains what programming in the .NET environment means in practice. It covers Visual Studio, the main development environment in which you will write, compile, debug, and optimize your C# programs, and provides guidelines for writing good applications. Visual Studio is the main IDE used for everything from writing Web Forms and Windows Forms to XML Web services, and more. For more details on Windows Forms and how to write user interface code, see Chapter 31, “Windows Forms.” This chapter takes a strong look at the following:
- Using Visual Studio 2008
- Refactoring with Visual Studio
- Visual Studio 2008’s multi-targeting capabilities
- Working with the new technologies WPF, WCF, WF, and more.
This chapter also explores what it takes to build applications that are targeted at the .NET Framework 3.0 or 3.5. The types of applications provided ever since the .NET Framework 3.0 class library include the Windows Presentation Foundation (WPF), the Windows Communication Foundation (WCF), and the Windows Workflow Foundation (WF). Working with Visual Studio 2008 will provide you the ability to work ...
