The Visual C# 2005 Express IDE
Brief overview on the integrated development environment (IDE) of Visual C#
Depending on the project type selected, the IDE will change some of its features. The following figure displays the IDE for a windows application project:
As shown in the figure, the windows application project displays a `form'. This is the main window of our application. We can place various `controls' like buttons, text boxes and menus on the form to create the user interface. We can also write code that will execute when the user interacts with these controls. Windows application programming is covered in the latter part of this tutorial.
If we are creating a console application, the IDE elements will be changed:
As we can see, there is no form because console programs do not have a windows-like interface. Instead, there is a pre-written code that we can use as the starting point of our program. The Toolbox is not available because console applications do not use controls. The first few chapters of this tutorial will concentrate on the console applications.
A class library project will look similar to a console application project in the IDE. However, the pre-written code will be somewhat different.
