Visual Studio .NET - Project Names
(Page 3 of 10 )
Project names may consist of any standard ASCII characters except for the following:
- Pound (#)
- Percent (%)
- Ampersand (&)
- Asterisk (*)
- Vertical bar (|)
- Backslash (\)
- Colon (:)
- Double quotation mark (”)
- Less than (<)
- Greater than (>)
- Question mark (?)
- Forward slash (/)
- Leading or trailing spaces ( )
- Windows or DOS keywords, such as “nul,” “aux,” “con,” “com1,” and “lpt1”
The Integrated Development Environment (IDE) The Visual Studio .NET integrated development environment (IDE) consists of windows for visual design of forms, code-editing windows, menus and toolbars providing access to commands and features, toolboxes containing controls for use on the forms, and windows providing properties and information about forms, controls, projects, and the solution.
Layout Visual Studio .NETis a multiple document interface (MDI) application. It consists of a single parent window, which contains multiple windows. All the menus, toolbars, design and editing windows, and miscellaneous other windows are associated with the single parent window.
A typical layout of the IDE is shown in Figure 2-3. This section discusses the overall layout and many of the features that make working with the IDE so productive.
Figure 2-3. Typical IDE Layout
The Visual Studio .NET window has a title bar across the top with menus below. Under the menus are toolbars with buttons that duplicate many of the common menu commands. Nearly everything that can be done through menus can also be done with context-sensitive pop-up menus, as described in the discussion that follows. The menu and toolbars are easily customized by clicking on Tools -> Customize.
The toolbars are docked along the top of the window by default. As with many Windows applications, they can be undocked and moved to other locations, either free-floating or docked along other window edges. You move the toolbars by grabbing them with the mouse and dragging them where you want.
Figure 2-3 shows a design view of a web form, with the design window occupying the main area in the center of the screen. This allows for visual design by dragging and dropping components from the Toolbox along the left side of the screen.
Along the right side of the screen are two windows, both of which will be covered in more detail later in this chapter. The upper window is the Solution Explorer. Below that is the Properties window. There are many other similar windows available to you, as will be described.
All of these windows, plus the Toolbox, are resizable and dockable. They can be resized by placing the mouse cursor over the edge you want to move. The cursor will change to a double-arrow resizing cursor, at which point you can drag the window edge one way or the other.
Right-clicking on the title bar of a dockable window pops up a menu with four mutually exclusive check items:
Dockable
The window can be dragged and docked along any side of the Visual Studio .NET window.
Hide
The window disappears. To see the window again (i.e., to unhide it), use the View main menu item.
Floating
The window will not dock when dragged against the edge of the Visual Studio .NET window. The floating window can be placed anywhere on the desktop, even outside the Visual Studio .NET window.
You can also double-click on either the title bar or the tab to dock and undock the window. Double-clicking on the title while docked undocks the entire group. Double-clicking on the tab just undocks the one window, leaving the rest of the group docked.
Auto Hide
The window will disappear, indicated only by a tab, when the cursor is not over the window. It will reappear when the cursor is over the tab. A pushpin in the upper right corner of the window will be pointing down when Auto Hide is turned off and pointing sideways when it is turned on.
In the upper-right corner of the window are two icons:
Pushpin
This icon toggles the AutoHide property of the window.
When the pushpin is pointing down, the window is pinned in place; AutoHide is turned off. Moving the cursor off the window will not affect its visibility.
When the pushpin is pointing sideways, AutoHide is turned on. Moving the cursor off the window hides the window. To see the window again, click on the tab, which is now visible along the edge where the window had been docked.
Standard close window icon.
The main design window uses a tabbed metaphor (i.e., the tabs along the top edge of that window indicate there are other windows below it). You can change to an MDI style, if you prefer, in Tools -> Options. Clicking on the tab labeled WebForm1.aspx. cs in Figure 2-3, for example, will bring up the screen shown in Figure 2-4, which contains a code window.
Figure 2-4. Code window in IDE
When you switch from a design window to a code window, the menu items, toolbars, and toolbox change in a context-sensitive manner.
The code window has drop-down lists at the top of the screen for navigating around the application. The left drop-down contains a list of all the classes in the code and the right drop-down has a list of all the objects in the current class. In VB.NET you can also use these drop-downs to select event sources (from the lefthand drop-down) and add event handlers (from the righthand drop-down). This also works in the HTML editor.
Along the bottom edge of the IDE window is a status bar, which shows such information as the current cursor position (when a code window is visible), the status of the Insert key, and any pending shortcut key combinations.
Menus and Toolbars The menus provide access to many of the commands and capabilities of Visual Studio .NET. The more commonly used menu commands are duplicated with toolbar buttons for ease of use.
The menus and toolbars are context-sensitive (i.e., the available selection is dependent on what part of the IDE is currently selected, and what activities are expected or allowed). For example, if the current active window is a code-editing window, the top-level menu commands are:
File
Edit
View
Project
Build
Debug
Tools
Window
Help
If the current window is a design window, then the Data, Format, Table, Insert, and Frames menu commands also become available, for example.
The following sections describe some of the menu items and their submenus, focusing on those aspects that are interesting and different from common Windows commands.
 This article is excerpted from Programming ASP.NET by Jesse Liberty and Dan Hurwitz(O'Reilly, 2003; ISBN 0596004877). Check it out at your favorite bookstore today. Buy this book now. |
Next: File Menu >>
More ASP.NET Articles
More By O'Reilly Media
