Visual Basic 2012 Programmer's Reference

CREATING A PROJECT

After you open Visual Studio, you can use the Start Page’s New Project link or the File menu’s New Project command to open the New Project dialog box shown in Figure 1-3.

FIGURE 1-3: The New Project dialog box lets you start a new project.

Use the Templates tree view on the left to select the project category that you want. Then select a specific project type on the right. In Figure 1-3, the Windows Forms Application project type is selected. Enter a name for the new project in the text box at the bottom.

After you fill in the new project’s information, click OK to create the project.

NOTE

Visual Studio initially creates the project in a temporary directory. If you close the project without saving it, it is discarded.

Figure 1-4 shows the IDE immediately after starting a new Windows Forms Application project. Remember that the IDE is extremely configurable, so it may not look much like Figure 1-4 after you have rearranged things to your liking (and I’ve arranged things to my liking here).

FIGURE 1-4: Initially a new project looks more or less like this.

The key pieces of the IDE are labeled with numbers in Figure 1-4. The following list briefly describes each of these pieces:

1. Menus — The menus contain standard Visual Studio commands. These generally ...