Visual Studio

With ASP.NET, you have several choices for developing web applications. If you’re inclined (and don’t
mind the work), you can code every web page and class by hand using a bare-bones text editor. This
approach is appealingly straightforward but tedious and error-prone for anything other than a simple
page. Professional ASP.NET developers rarely go this route.
Instead, almost all large-scale ASP.NET websites are built using Visual Studio. This professional
development tool includes a rich set of design tools, including legendary debugging tools and
IntelliSense, which catches errors and offers suggestions as you type. Visual Studio also supports the
robust code-behind model, which separates the .NET code you write from the web-page markup tags.
To seal the deal, Visual Studio adds a built-in test web server that makes debugging websites easy.
In this chapter, you’ll tour the Visual Studio IDE (Integrated Development Environment) and
consider the two ways you can create an ASP.NET web application in Visual Studio—either as a
straightforward website or as a web project. You’ll also learn about the code model used for ASP.NET
web pages and the compilation process used for ASP.NET web applications. Finally, you’ll take a quick
look at the Web Development Helper, a browser-based debugging tool that you can use in conjunction
with Visual Studio.
■ What’s New Although Visual Studio 2010 follows the same basic model as earlier versions, it gets a significant
facelift. In fact, Visual Studio 2010 has been completely rewritten using WPF (Microsoft’s .NET-based user-interface
technology), and the result is a cleaner, more modern interface. Most of the changes are in the details, such as
reduced on-screen clutter and streamlined IntelliSense (as described in the “Visual Studio 2010 Improvements”
section). But developers working with WPF or Silverlight (Chapter 34) get a long-awaited designer that lets them build
user interfaces by dragging and dropping controls from the Toolbox, just like in an ASP.NET page.