VS.NET IDE for ASP.NET

VS .NET IDE

Visual Studio .NET IDE (Integrated Development Environment) is the Development Environment for all .NET based applications which comes with rich features. VS .NET IDE provides many options and is packed with many features that simplify application development by handling the complexities within it. Visual Studio .NET IDE is an enhancement to all other previous IDE’s by Microsoft.

Important Features of Visual Studio .NET IDE

One IDE for all .NET based Projects

Visual Studio .NET IDE provides a single environment for developing all types of .NET applications. Application’s range from single windows applications to complex n-tier application and rich web applications.

Option to choose from Multiple Programming Languages

You can choose the programming language of your choice to develop applications based on your expertise in that language. You can also incorporate multiple programming languages in one .NET solution and edit that with the IDE.

IDE is Customizable

You can customize the IDE based on your preferences. The My Profile settings allow you to do this. With these settings you can set the IDE screen the way you want, the way the keyboard behaves and you can also filter the help files based on the language of your choice.

Built-in Browser

The IDE comes with a built-in browser that helps you browse the Internet without launching another application. You can look for additional resources, online help files, source codes and much more with this built-in browser feature.

When we open Visual Studio.NET from Start->Programs->Microsoft Visual Studio .NET->Microsoft Visual Studio .NET the window that is displayed first is the Start Page, which is shown below. The start Page allows us to select from the most recent projects (last four projects) with which we worked along with other useful resources.

The Integrated Development Environment(IDE) as shown in the image below, is what we actually work with. The IDE is shared by all the languages in Visual Studio. You can view the toolbar towards the left side of the image along with the Solution Explorer window towards the right.

The New Project dialogue box like the one in the image below is used to create a new project specifying it's type allowing us to name the project and also specify it's location under the web server where it is saved. The default location on the hard disk where all ASP .NET projects are saved is C:\Inetpub\wwwroot\

The Solution Explorer Window

The Solution Explorer window gives an overview of the solution we are working with and lists all the files in the project. An image of the Solution Explorer window is shown below.

The Server Explorer Window

The Server Explorer window is a great tool that provides "drag and drop" feature and helps us work with databases in an easy graphical environment. For example, if we drag and drop a database table onto a form, VB .NET automatically creates connection and command objects that are needed to access that table. The image below displays Server Explorer window.