Microsoft Visual Studio

Microsoft Visual Studio is an advanced integrated development environment by Microsoft.

Visual Studio includes one or more of the following. Components can be added in a modular fashion to the main application. *Visual Basic .NET, or prior to .NET, Visual Basic *Visual C Plus Plus *C Sharp *J Sharp *Microsoft SQL Server

In the past, the following products were included: *Visual InterDev, a web page development application used for modifying Active Server Pages as well as HTML and other web scripting files. *J Plus Plus, a Java programming language development tool *Visual FoxPro, an XBase programming language now allied to but independent from the Visual Studio platform.

Major Visual Studio versions include: *Visual Studio 97 *Visual Studio 6.0, released in 1998 (still popular with Visual Basic developers) *Visual Studio .NET, released in 2002 (includes .NET Framework 1.0) *Visual_Studio .NET#Visual_Studio_.NET_2003 (includes .NET Framework 1.1) *Visual Studio 2005, released in 2005 (includes .NET Framework 2.0)

The successor to Visual Studio 2005, code named Orcas , is currently scheduled to be released at the same time as Windows Vista.

The successor to Orcas is code-named Hawaii .

=Add-ins=

Visual Studio supports Microsoft s Add-in Architecture, a facility for developers to write extensions (or add-ins) for Visual Studio to extend its capabilities. These add-ins work as plug-ins to Visual Studio and offer some benefits not available from Visual Studio itself. For example, some add-ins offer optimized builds or enhanced programming tools or other rapid application development features. Some of the more popular add-ins include:

Xoreax Software s IncrediBuild

Whole Tomato Software s Visual Assist

Joshua Jensen s Workspace Whiz

JetBrains ReSharper

As with many helpful applications, some developers can become very attached to the functionality some add-ins provide. In a Game Developer Magazine Post Mortem article, the author stated that their game programmer felt handicapped when required to develop without their Visual Studio add-ins.

=See also=

in Visual Studio

Dynamic-Link Library, creating and using DLL s in Visual Studio

*Visual SourceSafe

= External links =

*[http://msdn.microsoft.com/vstudio/ Microsoft Visual Studio product page] *[http://msdn.microsoft.com/express/ Microsoft Visual Studio 2005 Express Editions page] *[http://msdn.microsoft.com/vstudio/teamsystem/ Microsoft Visual Studio Team System page] *[http://www.xona.com/2005/08/02.html Xona.com - Visual Studio .NET Keyboard Shortcuts]