Chapter 1: A Tour of Visual Studio .NET and Visual C# .NET

• Creating Applications for the .NET Platform
• Overview of Visual Studio .NET
• Creating Visual C# Solutions
• Layout of a Typical Visual C# Program

This chapter introduces you to Microsoft Visual Studio .NET and Microsoft Visual C# .NET. In this chapter, you’ll tour Visual Studio .NET and Visual C# .NET, and you’ll see how Visual C# is used to write software for the Microsoft .NET platform. Even if you have experience with earlier versions of Visual Studio, you’ll be surprised at the new features in Visual Studio .NET. Visual C# .NET offers great support for rapid application development (RAD), including features that make it easy to develop the basic elements of a program with just a few mouse clicks. A large number of project templates are available, including templates for Web and Microsoft Windows applications, XML Web services, and various types of components. You’ll also find cool productivity enhancements such as the Task List window, which simplifies the job of tracking the work that remains to be done on your project, and the Dynamic Help window, which automatically provides a list of relevant help topics as you’re working. Visual C# .NET also includes features that are unique in the Visual Studio .NET family, such as documentation comments, which Visual C# .NET can use to automatically generate HTML pages.

This chapter also introduces the basics of writing software using the Microsoft .NET Framework. You’ll write and build your first Visual C# program, using one of the project templates included with Visual C#, and then we’ll look at the layout of a simple Visual C# program.