Visual Basic 2012 Programmer's Reference

DIFFERENT IDE APPEARANCES

Before you start reading about the IDE and viewing screen shots, it’s important to understand that the Visual Studio IDE is extremely customizable. You can move, hide, or modify the menus, toolbars, and windows; create your own toolbars; dock, undock, or rearrange the toolbars and windows; and change the behavior of the built-in text editors (change their indentation, colors for different kinds of text, and so forth).

NOTE

These chapters describe the basic Visual Studio development environment as it is initially installed. After you’ve moved things around to suit your needs, your IDE may look nothing like the pictures in this book. If a figure doesn’t look exactly like what you see on your computer, don’t worry too much about it.

To avoid confusion, you should probably not customize the IDE’s basic menus and toolbars too much. Removing the help commands from the Help menu and adding them to the Edit menu will only cause confusion later. Moving or removing commands will also make it more difficult to follow the examples in this and other books, and will make it more difficult to follow instructions given by others who might be able to help you when you have problems.

Instead of making drastic changes to the default menus and toolbars, hide the menus and toolbars that you don’t want and create new customized toolbars to suit your needs. Then you can find the original standard toolbars if you decide you need them later.

The screens shown in this book ...