Chapter 1 Exploring the Visual Studio Integrated Development Environment 29
Customizing IDE Settings to Match
Step-by-Step Exercises
Like the tool windows and other environment settings within the IDE, the compiler settings
within Visual Studio are highly customizable. It is important to review a few of these settings
now so that your version of Visual Studio is configured in a way that is compatible with the
step-by-step programming exercises that follow. You will also learn how to customize Visual
Studio generally so that as you gain programming experience, you can set up Visual Studio
in the way that is most productive for you.Setting the IDE for Visual Basic Development
The first setting that you need to check was established when Visual Studio was first installed
on your machine. During setup, you were asked how you wanted Visual Studio to configure
your general development environment. Since Visual Studio is a multi-purpose programming
tool, you had many options—Visual Basic development, Visual C++ development, Visual C#
development, Web development, and so on. The selection you made configured not only
the Code Editor and the development tools available to you, but also the menu and toolbar
commands and the contents of several tool windows. For this reason, if you plan to use
this book to learn Visual Basic programming but originally configured your software for
a different language, a few of the menu commands and procedures described in this book
will not exactly match your current software configuration.Fortunately, you can fix this inconsistency and practice changing your environment settings
by using the Import And Export Settings command on the Tools menu. The following
steps show you how to change your environment setting to Visual Basic development, the
recommended setting for this book.Set the IDE for Visual Basic development- On the Tools menu, click Import And Export Settings.
Tip If you are using Visual Basic 2010 Express, click the Tools menu, click Settings,
and then click Import And Export Settings.You can use the wizard that appears to save your environment settings for use on
another computer, load settings from another computer, or reset your settings.- Click Reset All Settings, and then click Next.
Visual Studio asks you if you want to save your current settings in a file before you
configure the IDE for a different type of programming. It is always a good idea to save
your current settings as a backup, so that you can return to them if the new ones don’t
work out.