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. 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.
This chapter describes the Visual Studio IDE. 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 exe-
cutable 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 applica-
tion’s proposal and architecture documents. These are not included in the compiled code, but it is useful
to associate 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 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 pro-
gram, 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.
While you can add any file to a project or solution, it’s not a good idea to load dozens of unrelated files.
While you may sometimes want to refer to an unrelated file while working on a project, the extra clutter
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