Visual C# .NET Part 3: Visual Studio.NET at Work - More Start Page Details
(Page 3 of 5 )
Figure 5 illustrates the ‘Online Community’, which you can use to get more information and to contact other VS.NET developers all over the world via forums, newsgroups, websites like www.codeproject.com. The content of this page is filtered using your help filter setting (that we will set up in the ‘My Profile’ link). If you set your help filter to Visual C# and Related, you will get only the information related to C# and .NET Framework.
Figure 5
Figure 6 shows the ‘Headlines’ link, which when connected to MSDN online provides you with technical and knowledge base articles and news. This will be very useful for you every day you program with C#. Consider this link as a shortcut to the useful links and information about C# from MSDN web site.
Figure 6
Figure 7 illustrates the page that will show up when you click on ‘Search Online’ link which will allow you to search the online MSDN and you must be connected to the Internet to be able to search the MSDN. Just type a keyword and click the Go button, and you will get the result from the web site.
Figure 7
Figure 8 shows the ‘Downloads’ link, which is the most useful link here because it provides products updates, sample code, and many other downloads. Try to check this link each month. This link is updated with the latest downloads from Microsoft.
Figure 8
Figure 9 shows the ‘XML Web Services’ link, which you will find useful when you know more about Microsoft.NET web services.
Figure 9
There is also information to use if you developed a web service (see Figure 10) and you want to host it. This link is attached to www.msdn.microsoft.com and will give you a list of web hosting companies that you can use to host your web services. But it’s not a free hosting.
Figure 11 shows the ‘My Profile’ link, which provides you with options to customize your Visual Studio.NET environment. For now we will change one option only and it’s about help filter. After you click on the link, change the Help Filter to Visual C# and Related so you will view only information about C# and related sections like .NET Framework and any related information.
Figure 10
Figure 11
Now that we have finished the start page links, we must now discuss the VS.NET menus and toolbars. Then we will begin developing our simple console application which will ask you for your name and print it again to you (the same application that we developed using C# compiler) and while we are developing the application we will discuss more about using VS.NET.
Next: VS.NET Menus and Toolbars >>
More .NET Articles
More By Michael Youssef
/ 46 
