Microsoft Visual Studio

From Academic Kids

Microsoft Visual Studio is an integrated development environment by Microsoft.

Visual Studio includes one or more of the following. Components can be added in a modular fashion to the main application.

Visual Basic .NET, or prior to .NET, Visual Basic
Visual C++
Visual C#
Visual J#
Microsoft SQL Server

In the past, the following products were included:

Visual InterDev, a web page development application used for modifying Active Server Pages as well as HTML and other web scripting files.
Visual J++, a Java development tool
Visual FoxPro, an xBase programming language now allied to but independent from the Visual Studio platform.

Major Visual Studio versions include:

Visual Studio 97
Visual Studio 6.0, released in 1998 (still popular with VB6 developers who can not shift to VB.NET)
Visual Studio .NET, released in 2002 (includes .NET Framework 1.0)
Visual Studio .NET 2003 (includes .NET Framework 1.1)
Visual Studio .NET 2005, code named Whidbey (currently in beta)

The successor to Visual Studio 2005, code named Orcas, is currently scheduled to be released at the same time as Windows Longhorn.

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Add-ins

Visual Studio supports Microsoft's Add-in Architecture, a facility for developers to write extensions (or add-ins) for Visual Studio to extend its capabilities. These add-ins work as plug-ins to Visual Studio and offer some benefits not available from Visual Studio itself. For example, some add-ins offer optimized builds or enhanced programming tools or other rapid application development features. Some of the more popular add-ins include:

As with many helpful applications, some developers can become very attached to the functionality some add-ins provide. In a Game Developer Magazine "Post Mortem" article, the author stated that their programmers felt handicapped when required to develop without their Visual Studio add-ins.

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