Book Layout
Inside Microsoft Visual Studio .NET 2003 is divided into three parts: In Part I, Visual Studio .NET as a Development Tool, we discuss the Visual Studio .NET user experience and how developers can make the most of the features of the IDE to become as productive as possible. If you're a developer who is very experienced with the IDE, you can probably breeze through the first part of the book fairly quickly, though we've tried to add enough surprises so that most developers will learn something new for their efforts. The subjects covered in Part I include a discussion of the history of the IDE, managing solutions and projects, using the code editor, and an introduction to the macros facility. Part II of the book, Extending Visual Studio .NET, provides an in-depth discussion of Visual Studio .NET 2003 add-ins and the automation object model. In these chapters, you'll get an overview of the extensibility API, architectural information about add-ins and commands; a discussion of programmatic solution and project management; and information about building Visual Studio .NET wizards, programming the Visual Studio .NET user interface, controlling the text editor, and using the code model to parse your source files.In Part III of the book, we grouped together a number of topics that tend not to get covered in most programming books because they're not usually central to the language that's discussed. These topics include an in-depth look at how to build deployment projects using the Visual Studio .NET Help facility and building your own Help into Visual Studio .NET. Finally, we devote some space to command-line options used to build and test Visual Studio .NET 2003 solutions and to using Microsoft Visual SourceSafe for version control.
The book also includes an appendix that provides you with some reference material for the code object model discussed in Chapter 12.