Skip to Content
Visual Studio® 2010 All-in-One For Dummies®
book

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

by Rick Leinecker
June 2010
Beginner
912 pages
18h 27m
English
For Dummies
Content preview from 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 ...

Become an O’Reilly member and get unlimited access to this title plus top books and audiobooks from O’Reilly and nearly 200 top publishers, thousands of courses curated by job role, 150+ live events each month,
and much more.

Read now

Unlock full access

More than 5,000 organizations count on O’Reilly

AirBnbBlueOriginElectronic ArtsHomeDepotNasdaqRakutenTata Consultancy Services

QuotationMarkO’Reilly covers everything we've got, with content to help us build a world-class technology community, upgrade the capabilities and competencies of our teams, and improve overall team performance as well as their engagement.
Julian F.
Head of Cybersecurity
QuotationMarkI wanted to learn C and C++, but it didn't click for me until I picked up an O'Reilly book. When I went on the O’Reilly platform, I was astonished to find all the books there, plus live events and sandboxes so you could play around with the technology.
Addison B.
Field Engineer
QuotationMarkI’ve been on the O’Reilly platform for more than eight years. I use a couple of learning platforms, but I'm on O'Reilly more than anybody else. When you're there, you start learning. I'm never disappointed.
Amir M.
Data Platform Tech Lead
QuotationMarkI'm always learning. So when I got on to O'Reilly, I was like a kid in a candy store. There are playlists. There are answers. There's on-demand training. It's worth its weight in gold, in terms of what it allows me to do.
Mark W.
Embedded Software Engineer

You might also like

Microsoft® Visual Studio® 2010 Unleashed

Microsoft® Visual Studio® 2010 Unleashed

Mike Snell, Lars Powers
Visual Studio Condensed

Visual Studio Condensed

Patrick Desjardins

Publisher Resources

ISBN: 9780470539439Purchase book