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VB Gets More RAD |
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Toolbox. The Visual Studio toolbox should be familiar to any longtime user of Visual Basic; it enables developers to easily lay out the appearance of an application. |  |
Code window. The code window lets developers write code that provides event handing and other functionality for the components placed on the design form. | |||||
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Design pane. The design pane provides the backdrop for the layout of the appearance of the application. |  |
Class Designer. If used, the Class Designer displays the class structure of the application in a separate window pane. Developer can view the structure of an existing application, or begin development by designing the class structure visually. | |||||
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New views in the Design pane. When laying out a more complex control such as a menu strip, the design pane shows that control separately, in addition to the menu view in the pane itself. |  |
Solution Explorer. The Solution Explorer not only shows the project structure and project files, but also it includes tabs for the data sources and Class Designer, if used. | |||||
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Debugger window. The debugger window shows debug output when building and running applications within Visual Studio. The exact windows and window layout remain highly customizable. |  |
Properties window. The Properties window displays the properties of a selected control in the design window, and lets developers set default values for a wide variety of properties. | |||||
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The new VB Start page. The Visual Basic view incorporates a Start page that displays links to resources of interest to developers still getting used to the new features of Visual Studio 2005. | |||||||
Figure 2. Meet the New Boss VB.
The new VB looks a lot like the old VB, but it gets a significant upgrade in terms of its RAD features in its 2005 iteration. If anything, the inclusion of My and the return of edit-and-continue hearken back to a time when VB was all about getting things accomplished, as opposed to coding everything from scratch. A careful look at the VB IDE reveals that it’s a virtual twin of the C# IDE, and that appearance is more than skin deep: The tools remain fundamentally alike at their cores, deriving as they do from a common framework. But the team that created VB has gone some distance to reestablishing the tool as a RAD workhorse, and the new data features, while available to both, feel much more innate to the VB experience than they do to the C# experience.