Overview
Developing for the Microsoft platform involves a lot of boilerplate coding. Back in the early days of Windows development, most developers started a Windows-based project armed with only a copy of Charles Petzold's Programming Windows and the Windows Software Development Kit (SDK). Even the Windows SDK documentation recommended the editor inheritance method of application development.To understand the fundamental underpinnings of any technology, you have to write all the code for an application. But there comes a time when writing the same boilerplate again and again becomes merely a drill and a waste of time. To address this issue, the Microsoft Visual Studio .NET environment provides a set of code generators to start you off on all types of projects. The available project templates appear in the New Project window when you choose New, Project from the File menu. You select the project template you want, run through the dialog boxes to configure the project, and click Finish. Voilá— you've got a working application.But that's not the end of the story. The wizard technology is extensible— you can write your own wizards. This chapter gives you a rundown of Visual Studio .NET's wizards and explains how to write your own.