Introduction to Visual Studio

 Introduction Visual Studio is a complete set of development tools for building ASP.NET Web applications, XML Web Services, desktop applications, and mobile applications. Visual Basic, Visual C++, Visual C#, and Visual J# all use the same integrated development environment (IDE), which allows them to share tools and facilitates in the creation of mixed-language solutions. In addition, these languages leverage the functionality of the .Visual Studio can be used to write console applications, Windows applications, Windows services, Windows Mobile applications, ASP.NET applications, and ASP.NET web services, in your choice of C++, C#, VB.NET, J#, and more. Visual Studio also includes various additional development tools, such as Visual SourceSafe; which tools are included depends greatly on the edition of Visual Studio that you are using

Capabilities

What can you really do with Visual Studio? Following are some of the various applications that can be built using Visual Studio.

• Console applications: These applications run from the command line and do not include a graphical interface, but are great for small tools or anything that will be run by another application.

• Windows services: Services are applications that run in the background while your computer is running. These are usually applications that will have to perform scheduled tasks or handle continuous network requests.
• ASP.NET applications: ASP.NET is a powerful technology that is used to create dynamic web applications, often driven by a database. Many popular websites are written using ASP.NET, including those of e-commerce giants like Dell.
• ASP.NET web services: ASP.NET provides a complete web services model that allows you to quickly and easily create web services.
• Windows Mobile applications: Windows Mobile applications can run on devices that include the Compact framework; these include Pocket PC devices, as well as cell phones running the Microsoft Smartphone platform

• Web Form

  Web Forms are an ASP.NET technology that you use to create programmable Web pages. Web Forms render themselves as browser-compatible HTML and script, which allows any browser on any platform to view the pages. Using Web Forms, you create Web pages by dragging and dropping controls onto the designer and then adding code, similar to the way that you create Visual Basic forms. For more information, see ASP.NET Web Pages Overview.
  
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• MFC/ATL/Win32 applications: You can also still create traditional MFC, ATL, or Win32 applications using C++. These applications do not need the .NET runtime to run, but also don't include many of the benefits of working with the .NET framework.

• Windows Forms

  Windows Forms is for creating Microsoft Windows applications on the .NET Framework. This framework provides a clear, object-oriented, extensible set of classes that enables you to develop rich Windows applications. Additionally, Windows Forms can act as the local user interface in a multi-tier distributed solution. For more information, see Introduction to Win
  
   
• Visual Studio add-ins: That's right, you can use Visual Studio to write new functionality to be added into Visual Studio.
• And more: Visual Studio also includes projects to deploy your application, work with databases, create reports, and more.

Visual Studio provides an extensible model for adding new projects to Visual Studio; many other Microsoft applications now integrate directly into the IDE. Some of the most common include SQL Server Reporting Services and Visual Studio T
All of the above applications could be written using another IDE or some combination of freely available SDKs and your favorite text editor, so why would you pay for Visual Studio? Visual Studio is dedicated to making your development life easier through time-saving and convenient features; here are some of the most compelling of those features.

• IntelliSense: IntelliSense is the trademark feature of Visual Studio. IntelliSense simply helps you while programming by showing you the available classes and the methods and properties available on those classes. Can't remember what the name of that class, method, or property is? No worries, IntelliSense will help out.
• Designers: Visual Studio includes visual WSYIWYG designers for Windows applications, ASP.NET applications, and Windows Mobile applications. These designers make it much easier to get your application looking just right.
• Debugging: One of the most important features of Visual Studio is the ability to step through your application line by line as it is executing. Not sure why you are getting an error? Simply walk through and see exactly what is going wrong.
• Organization: Visual Studio is built for developing applications, so it provides intuitive methods for organizing your various code files into projects and your various projects into solutio