VISUAL STUDIO

Visual Studio is an Integrated Development Environment (IDE) from Microsoft. We can use visual studio to develop console as well as GUI applications, along with windows form applications, web site, web applications, web services.

Visual Studio includes a code editor supporting IntelliSense as well as code refactoring. This has reduced the amount of coding to be done by developer.
Visual Studio does not support any programming language, solution or tool intrinsically. Instead, it allows various functionality to be plugged in. Visual Studio supports languages by means of language services, which allow any programming language to be supported (to varying degrees) by the code editor and debugger, provided a language-specific service has been authored. Built-in languages include C/C++ (via Visual C++), VB.NET (via Visual Basic .NET), and C# (via Visual C#). Support for other languages such as Chrome, F#, Python, and Ruby among others has been made available via language services which are to be installed separately. It also supports XML/XSLT, HTML/XHTML, JavaScript and CSS. Language-specific versions of Visual Studio also exist which provide more limited language services to the user. These individual packages are called Microsoft Visual Basic, Visual J#, Visual C#, and Visual C++.
Currently, Visual Studio 2008 and 2005 Professional Editions, along with language-specific versions (Visual Basic, C++, C#, J#) of Visual Studio 2005 are available to students as downloads free of charge.

INTRODUCTION

The .NET Framework is an integral Windows component that supports building and running the next generation of applications and XML Web services. It includes a large library of pre-coded solutions to common programming problems and a virtual machine that manages the execution of programs written specifically for the framework. The .NET Framework is a key Microsoft offering and is intended to be used by most new applications created for the Windows platform.
The .NET Framework has two main components: the common language runtime and the .NET Framework class library. These will be discussed in a later stage.