C# 24-Hour Trainer, 2nd Edition

Lesson 1

Getting Started with the Visual Studio IDE

The Visual Studio integrated development environment (IDE) plays a central role in C# development. In this lesson you explore the IDE. You learn how to configure it for C# development, and you learn about some of the more useful of the IDE's windows and what they do. When you finish this lesson, you'll know how to create a new project. It may not do much, but it will run and will prepare you for the lessons that follow.

Visual C#

Visual Studio is a development environment that you can use with several programming languages including Visual C#, Visual Basic, Visual C++, and F#. All of those are high-level programming languages that you can use to perform complex calculations, organize your Pokémon cards, draw pretty fractals (see en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fractal and mathworld.wolfram.com/Fractal.html), play games, download cat pictures from the Internet, and do everything else you would expect from a program.

They can also contain bugs that delete files accidentally, discard an hour's worth of typing without warning, balance your checkbook incorrectly, and cause all sorts of other problems. Programming languages can help you do things, but they can't force you to do the right things. That's up to you.

Visual C# combines C# with the Visual Studio development environment. You can use a text editor to write C# programs without Visual Studio, but it's a lot of work. You don't get all of the nice features that Visual Studio provides, ...