Visual Basic® 2008 Programmer's Reference

Chapter 6. Visual Basic Code Editor

The Visual Studio IDE includes editors for many different kinds of documents, including several different kinds of code. For example, it has Hypertext Markup Language (HTML), Extensible Markup Language (XML), Extensible Application Markup Language (XAML), and Visual Basic editors. These editors share some common features, such as displaying comments and keywords in different colors.

As a Visual Basic developer, you will use the Visual Basic code editor frequently, so you should spend a few minutes learning about its specialized features. The most obvious feature of the code editor is that it lets you type code into a module, but the code editor is far more than a simple text editor such as Notepad. It provides many features to make writing correct Visual Basic code easier. This chapter describes some of the most important of these features.

The Visual Basic code editor provides many features that are not provided by other Visual Studio editors. For example, the HTML, XML, and XAML editors do not provide breakpoints or features that let you step through executing code. Even the C# code editor is missing some of the features in the Visual Basic editor, such as immediately updated error indicators as you type.

Figure 6-1 shows the code editor displaying some Visual Basic code at runtime. To make referring to the code lines easier, this figure displays line numbers. To display line numbers, invoke the Tools menu's Options command, navigate to the Text ...