Visual Studio® 2010 All-in-One For Dummies®

Chapter 1. What Is Visual Studio?

In This Chapter

• Figuring out Visual Studio's role in software development

• Seeing Microsoft's vision for Visual Studio

• Saying hello to .NET

To be truthful, building software that does more than just say something like "Hello world" requires more than just writing a few lines of code in a text editor. Who knew that business software could be so complex?

That's where tools such as Visual Studio enter the picture. Visual Studio enables you to build software more quickly by offering an advanced editor, compiler, and debugger in a single, easy-to-use package.

From Source Code to Application: How Software Is Written

There are three parts to writing software:

• Creation of source code: This source code is human-readable and normally text-based. Source code comes in many flavors depending on the language used. (Chapter 4 contains a lot more information about languages.)

• Compilation: During compilation, the source code is translated into binary executable data. This data takes many forms, including a compiler such as the one built into Visual Studio, an interpreter such as the command line (which ultimately creates binary executable data), or a variety of intermediate steps, such as a Java Virtual Machine, which takes pseudocode and converts to binary executable.

• Execution of the program: This step takes place as part of the development process while testing and then independently when users run the software. Figure 1-1 displays a summary of this process.

Note

The Visual ...