Datasheet

Chapter 1

There is much more than this, but hopefully you've got the idea!

Visual C# .NET Standard Edition

Visual C# .NET Standard Edition is a cut-down version of Visual Studio .NET Professional, and at a

cut-down price too. While it offers many of the same features as Visual Studio .NET Professional, there

are some notable feature absences, although not so many that they will prevent you from using the

Standard Edition to work through this book.

Throughout the book, unless stated otherwise, the term "Visual Studio .NET" (or simply "VS") will refer

to either version – Visual Studio .NET or the Visual C# .NET Standard Edition. There will be some

occasions where we mean one version or the other in particular, and we shall mark these carefully, so

that if you are an owner of the version not being discussed, you will not get confused!

VS Solutions

When we use VS to develop applications, we do so by creating solutions. A solution, in VS terms, is more

than just an application. Solutions contain projects, which might be "Windows Forms projects", "Web Form

projects", and so on. However, solutions can contain multiple projects, so that we can group together related

code in one place, even if it will eventually compile to multiple assemblies in various places on our hard disk.

This is very useful, as it allows us to work on "shared" code (which might be placed in the Global

Assembly Cache) at the same time as applications that use this code. Debugging code is a lot easier when

only one development environment is used, as we can step through instructions in multiple code modules.

Summary

In this chapter we've looked at the .NET Framework in general terms, and discussed how it makes it

easy for us to create powerful and versatile applications. We've seen what is necessary to turn code in

languages such as C# into working applications, and what benefits we gain from using managed code

running in the .NET Common Language Runtime.

We've also seen what C# actually is, and how it relates to the .NET Framework, and described the tool

that we'll be using for C# development – Visual Studio .NET.

In the next chapter we'll get some C# code running using VS, which will give us enough knowledge to

sit back and concentrate on the C# language itself, rather than worrying too much about how VS works.