Microsoft Visual Studio

Microsoft Visual Studio is an IDE from Microsoft used to develop Microsoft Windows-based application software. The Microsoft Visual Studio Supports multiple programming languages, including:


 * C++
 * C#
 * Visual Basic .NET

Visual Studio can be used for ASP.NET web development.

Visual Studio 97
The first version of Visual Studio was Visual Studio 97, which bundled many existing Microsoft development tools: Visual Basic, Visual C++, Visual J++ and support for ASP web programming. While Visual C++ and J++ used the same development environment, the Visual Basic IDE was a separate executable.

Visual Studio 6
Visual Studio 6 was released in June, 1998, and was the last Visual Studio version that did not use the .NET Framework.

Visual Studio .NET
Visual Studio .NET was released in 2002, introducing the managed code platform, .NET Framework. It and subsequent versions will only run on a Windows NT- based platform. The new version introduced C#, Microsoft's new programming language, and the successor to J++: J#.

The new version was a major improvement to the UI, with all language tools being integrated to the same environment. It supports Windows Forms application development, ASP and .NET Compact Framework development for mobile devices.

Visual Studio 2005
Visual Studio 2005 was released in October 2005. The name no longer included the .NET part. It was upgraded to support .NET Framework 2.0 projects.

It also included additions to the IntelliSense automatic code completion feature, new ASP.NET project types and support for Microsoft SQL Server 2005 databases.

Service Pack 1 for it was released in December 2006.

Visual Studio 2008


Visual Studio 2008 was released in November 2007, alongside the .NET Framework 3.5. VS2008 is focused on Windows Vista and Microsoft Office development. It introduced a new .NET language feature, LINQ, alongside new versions of C# and Visual Basic, and a visual designer for the Windows Presentation Foundation.

Features
Visual Studio includes a source code editor for all supported languages, a Windows Forms and Windows Presentation Foundation form designer, compilers and a debugger.

Code editor
Visual Studio's source code editor includes syntax highlighting and code completion with the IntelliSense feature for variables, functions, methods and loops. IntelliSense supports all included languages, plus XML, CSS and JavaScript for web development.

Visual Studio also features background compilation, which compiles code in the background to see if it is functional or returns an error.

Debugger
VS includes a debugger that functions both as a source-level debugger and a machine-level debugger. It functions with managed and native code, and can be used for debugging applications written in all languages supported by Visual Studio. It can also attach to running processes.

Office add-in programmability
The latest version of Visual Studio, Microsoft Visual Studio 2008, also has support for creating Add-ins for various Microsoft Office applications. These are the supported ones:
 * Excel 2007
 * InfoPath 2007
 * Outlook 2007
 * PowerPoint 2007
 * Project 2007
 * Visio 2007
 * Word 2007
 * Excel 2003
 * Outlook 2003
 * PowerPoint 2003
 * Project 2003
 * Visio 2003
 * Word 2003

Tutorials

 * Installing Microsoft Visual Studio