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The Visual Studio IDE contains a huge number of menus, toolbars, windows, wizards, editors, and other components to help you build applications. Some of these, such as the Solution Explorer and the Properties window, you will use every time you work on a program. Others, such as the Breakpoints window and the Connect to Device dialog, are so specialized that it may be years before you need them.

Figure 1.7 shows the IDE with a simple project loaded and some of the IDE's most important pieces marked. The following list describes those pieces.

Figure 1.7

1. Menus– The menus provide all sorts of useful commands. Exactly which commands are available, which are enabled, and even which menus are visible depends on what kind of editor is open in the editing area (#4). Some particularly useful menus include File (opening old projects and creating new ones), View (finding windows), Project (adding new forms and other items to a project), Debug (build, run, and debug the project), and Format (arrange controls on a form).

2. Toolbars– The toolbars provide shortcuts for executing commands similar to those in the menus. Use the Tools menu's Customize command to determine which toolbars are visible.

3. Solution Explorer– The Solution Explorer lists the files in the project. One of the most important is Form1.cs, which defines the controls and code for the form named Form1. If you double-click a file in the Solution Explorer, the IDE opens it in the editing area.

4. Editing Area– The editing area displays files in appropriate editors. Most often you will use this area to design forms (place controls on them and set control properties) and write code for forms, but you can also use this area to edit other files such as text files, bitmaps, and icons.

5. Toolbox– The Toolbox contains controls and components that you can place on a form. Select a tool and then click and drag to put a copy of the tool on the form. Notice that the Toolbox groups controls in tabs (All Windows Forms, Common Controls, Containers, Menus & Toolbars, and so on) to make finding the controls you need easier.

6. Properties Window– The Properties window lets you set control properties. Click a control on the Form Designer (shown in the editing area in Figure 1.7) to select it, or click and drag to select multiple controls. Then use the Properties window to set the control(s) properties. Notice that the top of the Properties window shows the name (label1) and type (System.Windows.Forms.Label) of the currently selected control. The currently selected property in Figure 1.7 is Text, and it has the value First Name:. You'll spend a lot of time working with the Properties window.

7. Property Description– The property description gives you a reminder about the current property's purpose. In Figure 1.7, it says that the Text property gives the text associated with the control. (Duh!)

8. Other Windows– This area typically contains other useful windows. The tabs at the bottom let you quickly switch between different windows.

Figure 1.7 shows a fairly typical arrangement of windows, but Visual Studio is extremely flexible so you can rearrange the windows if you like. You can hide or show windows, make windows floating or docked to various parts of the IDE, make windows part of a tab group, and make windows automatically hide themselves if you don't need them constantly.

If you look closely at the right side of the title bar above one of the windows in Figure 1.7 (for example, the Properties window), you'll see three icons: a dropdown arrow (), a thumbtack (), and an X ().

If you click the dropdown arrow (or right-click the window's title bar), a menu appears with the following choices:

● Float– The window breaks free of wherever it's docked and floats above the IDE. You can drag it around and it will not re-dock. To make it dockable again, open the menu again and select Dock.

● Dock– The window can dock to various parts of the IDE. (This is kind of fun and I'll say more about it shortly.)

● Dock as Tabbed Document– The window becomes a tab in a tabbed area similar to #8 in Figure 1.7. Unfortunately, it's not always obvious which area will end up holding the window. To make the window a tab in a specific tabbed area, make it dockable and drag it onto a tab (described shortly).

● Auto Hide– The window shrinks itself to a small label stuck to one of the IDE's edges and its thumbtack icon turns sideways () to indicate that the window is auto-hiding. If you float the mouse over the label, the window reappears. As long as the mouse remains over the expanded window, it stays put, but if you move the mouse off the window, it auto-hides itself again (like a cockroach when you turn on the lights). Select Auto Hide again or click the sideways thumbtack to turn off auto-hiding. Auto-hiding gets windows out of the way so you can work in a bigger editing area.

● Hide– The window disappears completely. To get the window back, you'll need to find it somewhere in the bewildering assortment of menus. You can find many of the most useful windows in the View menu, the View menu's Other Windows submenu, and the Debug menu's Windows submenu.

The thumbtack in a window's title bar works just like the dropdown menu's Auto Hide command does. Click the thumbtack to turn on auto-hiding. Expand the window and click the sideways thumbtack to turn off auto-hiding. (Turning off auto-hiding is sometimes called pinning the window.)

The () symbol in the window's title bar hides the window just like the dropdown menu's Hide command does.

In addition to using a window's title bar menu and icons, you can drag windows into new positions. As long as a window is dockable or part of a tabbed window, you can grab its title bar and drag it to a new position.

As you drag the window, the IDE displays little drop targets to let you dock the window in various positions. If you move the window so the mouse is over a drop target, the IDE displays a translucent blue area to show where the window will land if you drop it. If you drop when the mouse is not over a drop target, the window becomes floating.

Figure 1.8 shows the Properties window being dragged in the IDE. The mouse is over the right drop target above the editing area so, as the translucent blue area shows, dropping it there would dock the window to the right side of the editing area. The picture is kind of messy, but it's not too hard to see what's going on if you give it a try.

Figure 1.8

The drop area just to the left of the mouse represents a tabbed area. If you drop on this kind of target, the window becomes a tab in that area.

Customization Moderation

Visual Studio lets you move, dock, float, hide, auto-hide, and tabify windows. If you have multiple monitors, you can float a window and move it to another monitor, giving you a larger editing area. It's so flexible that it can present as many different faces as a politician during an election year.

Feel free to customize the IDE to suit your needs, but if you do, keep in mind that your version of Visual Studio may look nothing like the pictures in this book. To minimize confusion, you may want to keep the IDE looking more or less like Figure 1.7, at least until you get a better sense of which tools will be most useful to you.