Preface

Just after they started building platforms that required development, Microsoft began building tools to perform that development. The authors of this book are personally familiar with edit, Programmer's Workbench, windbg, QuickC, QuickBasic, Visual C++, Visual Basic, Visual Interdev, Visual J++, and the general-purpose, all-time favorite, Notepad.

We've come a long way. This book is meant to provide the information that you need to get the most out of Microsoft's latest, and certainly greatest, integrated development environment (IDE): Visual Studio .NET (VS.NET). While the ".NET" portion of the name designates VS.NET's role in providing a full-featured IDE for all forms of .NET development, all of the major functions that Microsoft has provided in past IDEs are also supplied.