Stephens' C# Programming with Visual Studio® 2010 24-Hour Trainer

Getting Started with the

Visual Studio IDE

The Visual Studio integrated development environment (IDE) plays a central role in

Visual C# development. In this lesson you explore the IDE. You learn how to configure it

for Visual C# development, and you learn about some of the more useful of the IDE’s win-

dows and what they do. When you finish this lesson, you’ll know how to create a new proj-

ect. It may not do much, but it will run and will prepare you for the lessons that follow.

Visual Studio is a development environment that you can use with several pro-

gramming languages including Visual C#, Visual Basic, Visual C++, and F#.

C# is a high-level programming language that can read inputs, calculate results,

display outputs to the user, and perform other operations typical of high-level

programming languages.

Visual C# is the combination of C# used in the Visual Studio development envi-

ronment. You can use a text editor to write C# programs without Visual Studio,

but it’s a lot of work and is not the focus of this book.

Visual C# and C# go together like politicians and bickering: if you mention one,

most people assume you’re also talking about the other. Most people simply say

C#, so this book does, too, unless there’s a reason to distinguish between C# and

Visual C#.

The .NET Framework also plays an important role in C# programs. It includes

classes that make performing certain tasks easier, runtime tools that make it

possible to execute C# programs, and other plumbing necessary to build and

run C# programs.

Normally you don’t need to worry about whether a feature is provided by Visual

Studio, the C# language, or the .NET Framework. They all go together in this

book, so for the purposes of this book at least you can ignore the difference.

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4

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LESSON 1 GettinG Started with the ViSual Studio ide

INSTALLING C#

Before you can use C# to write the next blockbuster first-person Xbox game, you need to install it.

So if you haven’t done so already, install C#.

You can install the Express Edition at

www.microsoft.com/express/Windows. If you think you

need some other version (for example, you’re working on a big project and you need test manage-

ment, source code control, and other team programming tools), go to

msdn.microsoft.com/

vcsharp

and install the version that’s right for you.

It’s a big installation, so it could take a while.

TALKIN’ ’BOUT MY GENERATION

Developers talk about different generations of programming languages ranging

from the very primitive to quite advanced. In a nutshell, the different generations

of languages are:

1GL



— Machine language. This is a series of 0s and 1s that the machine can

understand directly.

2GL



— Assembly language. This is a translation of machine language into

terse mnemonics that can be easily translated into machine language. It pro-

vides no structure.

3GL



— A higher-level language such as FORTAN or BASIC. These provide

additional structure (such as looping and subroutines) that makes building

complex programs easier.

4GL



— An even higher-level language or development environment that helps

build programs, typically in a specific problem domain.

5GL



— A language where you specify goals and constraints and the language

figures out how to satisfy them. For example, the database Structured Query

Language (SQL) allows you to use statements like

SELECT FirstName FROM

Employees

. You don’t need to tell the database how to get the names; it fig-

ures that out for you.

Visual Studio provides code snippets that let you copy standard chunks of code into

your program, IntelliSense that helps you select and use functions and other pieces

of code, refactoring tools that help you rearrange and restructure your code, and

more. That makes Visual C# a 4GL (or perhaps a 3.5GL depending on how high

your standards are).

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