Datasheet

To avoid confusion, you should probably not customize the IDE’s basic menus and toolbars too much.
Removing the help commands from the Help menu and adding them to the Edit menu will only cause
confusion later. Moving or removing commands will also make it more difficult to follow the examples
in this and other books, and will make it more difficult to follow instructions given by others who might
be able to help you when you have problems.
It’s less confusing to leave the menus more or less alone. Hide any toolbars you don’t want and create new
customized toolbars to suit your needs. Then you can find the original standard toolbars if you decide you
need them later. The section “Customize” later in this chapter has more to say about rearranging the IDE’s
components.
Before you can understand how to use the IDE to manage Visual Basic projects and solutions, however,
you should know what projects and solutions are.
Projects and Solutions
A project is a group of files that produces some specific output. This output may be a compiled executable
program, a dynamic-link library (DLL) of classes for use by other projects, or a custom control for use on
other Windows forms.
A solution is a group of one or more projects that should be managed together. For example, suppose that
you are building a server application that provides access to your order database. You are also building
a client program that each of your sales representatives will use to query the server application. Because
these two projects are closely related, it might make sense to manage them in a single solution. When you
open the solution, you get instant access to all the files in both projects.
Both projects and solutions can include associated files that are useful for building the application but that
do not become part of a final compiled product. For example, a project might include the application’s
proposal and architecture documents. These are not included in the compiled code, but it is useful to asso-
ciate them with the project.
When you open the project, Visual Studio lists those documents along with the program files. If you double-
click one of these documents, Visual Studio opens the file using an appropriate application. For example, if
you double-click a file with a
.doc extension, Visual Studio normally opens it with Microsoft Word.
To associate one of these files with a project or solution, right-click the project in the Solution Explorer
(more on the Solution Explorer shortly). Select the Add command’s Add New Item entry, and use the
resulting dialog box to select the file you want to add.
Often a Visual Basic solution contains a single project. If you just want to build a small executable program,
you probably don’t need to include other programming projects in the solution.
Another common scenario is to place Visual Basic code in one project and to place documentation (such
as project specifications and progress reports) in another project within the same solution. This keeps the
documentation handy whenever you are working on the application but keeps it separate enough that it
doesn’t clutter the Visual Studio windows when you want to work with the code.
4
Part I: Getting Started
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