Chapter 1 Exploring the Visual Studio Integrated Development Environment 9
and then switch back and forth between documents quickly. Trying to sort out which tools
are important to you now and which you can learn about later is a difficult early challenge
when you’re learning the busy Visual Studio interface. Your development environment will
probably look best if you set your monitor and Windows desktop settings so that they
maximize your screen space, but even then things can get a little crowded.Tip Although I use a screen resolution of 800 × 600 for most of the screen shots in this
book—so that you can see the IDE clearly—I usually use 1280 x 1024 for writing code. You can
change the screen resolution in Windows 7 by right-clicking the Windows desktop and clicking
Screen Resolution. In Windows Vista, you right-click the Windows desktop and click Personalize.The purpose of all this tool complexity is to add many new and useful features to the IDE while
providing clever mechanisms for managing the clutter. These mechanisms include features
such as docking, auto hiding, floating, and a few other window states that I’ll describe later
in this chapter. If you’re just starting out with Visual Studio, the best way to deal with this feature
tension is to hide the tools that you don’t plan to use often to make room for the important
ones. The crucial tools for beginning Visual Basic programming—the ones you’ll start using right
away in this book—are the Designer, the Properties window, Solution Explorer, and the Toolbox.
You won’t use the Server Explorer, Class View, Object Browser, or Debug windows until later in
the book.