Visual Studio .NET IDE Objectives • To be introduced to the Visual Studio .NET Integrated Development Environment (IDE). • To become familiar with the types of commands contained in the IDE’s menus and toolbars. • To understand the use of various kinds of windows in the Visual Studio .NET IDE. • To understand Visual Studio .NET’s help features. • To be able to create, compile and execute a simple Visual Basic program. 2.1 Introduction Visual Studio .NET is Microsoft’s Integrated Development Environment (IDE) for creat- ing, running and debugging programs (also called applications) written in a variety of .NET programming languages. This IDE is a powerful and sophisticated tool that is used to create business-critical and mission-critical applications. In this chapter, we provide an overview of the Visual Studio .NET IDE and demonstrate how to create a simple Visual Basic pro- gram by dragging and dropping predefined building blocks into place—a technique called “visual programming.” We introduce additional features of the IDE and discuss the more advanced “visual programming” techniques throughout the book.