The basic Visual Studio IDE

TIP Remember that the IDE has context-sensitive help. For example, Figure 2-4
shows you roughly what you will see if you hit F1 when the focus is in the Solution
Explorer. There is also a “Dynamic Help” (use Ctrl+F1) feature that automatically
monitors what you are doing and attempts to put likely help topics into
focus. Figure 2-5 shows the list of dynamic help topics you see when you are
starting to work with a project. The downside to dynamic help is that it is CPU
intensive. Once you get comfortable with the IDE, you might want to turn it off
to improve performance.
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The View menu on the main menu bar is always available to bring a specific
window of the IDE into view (and into focus). Note that all windows on the IDE
can be dragged around and actually “free float.” Interestingly enough, these are
not MDI (multiple document interface) child windows that must live inside a
parent window—you can move any window in the IDE outside the main window.
Figure 2-4. Context-sensitive help at work
Figure 2-5. Dynamic help at work
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Another cool feature is that if you dock a window and it completely overlaps
an existing window, you are not as lost as you sometimes were in VB6. The reason
is that you automatically see the hidden windows as tabs. As an example, notice
where the cursor is pointing in Figure 2-6. To reveal one of the hidden windows
simply click and drag on the tab for that window. To recombine windows—for
example, to preserve real estate—simply drag one on top of the other. The use of
tabs in this way is a welcome change from the VB6 IDE, where overzealous
docking occasionally caused the IDE to become practically unusable, forcing you
to tweak the Registry in order to get things back to normal. Also note the use of
tabs in the main window gives you another way to access the IDE Start page.
A Tour of the Main Windows in the IDE
We cover the basic windows in this section and address specialized windows, such as
the ones for debugging, later in this chapter or in subsequent chapters. Before we go
Figure 2-6. Docked windows with tabs
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any further, however, we want to remind you that in the VS .NET IDE, as with most
modern Windows applications, you get context menus by right clicking. We strongly
suggest that you do a little clicking to become comfortable with each context menu.
For example, the context menu available in the editor is shown in Figure 2-7.
As you can see, this context menu makes a mixture of editing tools and
debugging tools available.
Next, the various icons on the menu bars have tool tips.1 A few of the icons
have little arrows on them indicating they actually serve as mini menus. For example,
the second item (Add New Item) has a list of the items you can add to a solution,
as you can see in Figure 2-8.
1. It has struck us, from time to time, that the need for tool tips shows that GUIs have their
limitations. We wonder if the next trend in UI design will be to have these things called
words on buttons dispensing with the icons completely??