Teach Yourself Visual Studio® .NET 2003 in 21 Days [Electronic resources] نسخه متنی

Week 3. In Review

Week 3 covered a broad range of interesting topics. You learned how to write internationally aware applications, how to automate your Visual Studio .NET environment, how to build reports, and how to keep your code safe with Microsoft Visual SourceSafe. You also learned how to stress test your applications, and you got insight in conceptual data design using object role modeling with Visio.

On Day 15, you learned how to use the globalization namespaces in .NET to write applications that are culturally aware. You learned how easy it is to correctly format controls on forms, currency data, and date/time data for different culture locales using the tools in Visual Studio .NET.

On Day 16, you were introduced to automation in Visual Studio .NET with macros. By writing your own macros, you learned that it's simple to automate repetitive tasks in the IDE. You learned how to use the macro recorder, and how to customize the code that the macro recorder generates to write automation code.

Day 17 took the knowledge you gained on Day 16 and applied it to writing add-ins. Add-ins are separate applications that you write in your .NET language of choice that can hook into the Visual Studio .NET IDE to give you more control than macros can. Writing applications with the Add-ins project templates enables you to develop compelling applications that interact and control the Visual Studio .NET IDE.

On Day 18, you were introduced to Crystal Reports for Visual Studio .NET. You learned how easy it is to write data-driven reports using either the push model or the pull model that Crystal can use when working with data. You also learned how easy it is to use the Report Viewer control for both Windows Forms and Web Forms.

Day 20 ran you through the ins and outs of using Visual SourceSafe to control and manage your source code from Visual Studio .NET. You learned that by using SourceSafe's check-in and check-out functions, you have a complete history of changes made to your source code. You also saw how to roll back changes made to your code by using the tools in Visual Studio .NET and how to compare your code to the checked-in version of the code that SourceSafe is controlling.

Day 21 introduced you to conceptual data design using object role modeling templates in Visio. You learned that by breaking down a process into plain-English sentences, you can use the tools in Visio to create conceptual data models. Finally, you learned how to take the conceptual model written in Visio to a database diagram template to create a fully normalized SQL Server database.