What Is Visual Studio, Should You Learn It, And If So Which Visual Studio Version?
To understand what Visual Studio (VS), it is crucial to go back a few years in time and see what came before it.
Front page And Visual Interdev
A few years ago, the only Microsoft software that could publish a website was either FrontPage (Microsoft equivalent to Dream Weaver) or Visual InterDev, a development tool that was clunky to use. The technology that was in use was Active Server pages which took data from (say) a SQL Server database and allowed you to publish it as HTML.
Visual Basic 6.0
On the other hand, if you needed to develop a forms application to run on a client computer, with no website insight, your Microsoft product of choice would be Visual Basic 6.0.
Reports In SQL Server
Finally, to create and publish stories based on SQL Server data, most people mostly used either Crystal reports or other third-party products such as Active Reports from Data Dynamics.
The.Net Platform
Microsoft released the.NET framework version 1.0 (the latest version is now 4.0) on 13th February 2002 that provides a set of common classes, which developers can use. For example, if you want to set a textbox background color to Pink, you can type in:
- txtBox. Back Color = System. Drawing. Color. Pink
- In this context, Pink belongs in the System. Drawing. Color namespace.
Virtual Studio
Microsoft released visual studio 2017 at about the same time, and encompassing development tool. It enables you to do 3 (or more) completely separate things although the interface is similar whatever you are doing. VS can be used to create:
- Websites, using ASP.NET, the.NET successor to Active Server Pages
- Windows Forms applications, using either Visual Basic or Visual C# (the successors to Visual Basic 6.)
- Report server projects, allowing you to publish reports based on SQL Server data to your company’s Intranet
- Most people would thus only use Visual Studio for one purpose, although the author does use all three types of application.
Visual Studio Versions
If you want to buy visual studio 2017, the latest versions are 2010, but you could also use VS 2005 and VS 2008 without losing much functionality. In addition, you could download Visual Studio Express from the Microsoft website, which according to most developers will work perfectly well (and has the benefit of being free)
Reasons to Choose VS 2017
We do not think the average person will benefit too much from the Visual Studio 2017 even though the upgrade contains many excellent features for the serious developer. The one noticeable Property is that -finally- you can now zoom in and out by holding down the Ctrl key and rotating the mouse wheel. However, there is one reason not to upgrade. When you click any variable, Property, object, or whatever in visual studio 2017, VS will highlight all instances of it throughout your code. We find this irritating even though it should be a useful feature.
Conclusion
If it is your first time you are buying Visual Studio, then it makes to go for the latest version. However, it is essential to note that you are not missing a great deal if you are stuck with an old version.