Visual Basic® 2010 Programmer's Reference

Chapter 2. Menus, Toolbars, and Windows

The Visual Studio IDE is incredibly powerful and provides hundreds of tools for building and modifying projects. The price you pay for all of these powerful tools is extra complexity. Because so many tools are available, it can take some digging to find the tool you want, even if you know exactly what you need.

This chapter describes the menus, toolbars, and windows that contain the tools provided by the IDE. It explains some of the most useful tools provided by the IDE and tells where to find them, provided you haven't moved them while customizing the IDE.

This chapter also tells how you can customize the menus and toolbars to give you easy access to the commands that you use most frequently and how to hide those that you don't need.

MENUS

The IDE's menus contain standard Visual Studio commands. These are generally commands that manipulate the project and the modules it contains. Some of the concepts are similar to those used by any Windows application (File

The menus are customizable, so you can add, remove, and rearrange the menus and the items they contain. This can be quite confusing, however, if you later need to find a command that you have removed from its normal place in the menus. Some developers place extra commands in standard menus, particularly the Tools menu, but it is generally risky to remove standard menu items. Usually it is safest ...