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Unit 1: The Integrated Development Environment

The IDE is composed of these parts:
“ The menu bar
“ The toolbar
“ The Project explorer
“ The Properties window

“ The Form Layout window
“ The toolbox
“ Form designers
“ Code windows
We’ll take a look at all of these parts in this overview.
1.4.1 The Menu Bar

The menu bar presents the Visual Basic menus. Here’s a list of those menus and what they do:
“File File handling and printing; also used to make EXE files
“Edit Standard editing functions, undo, searches
“View Displays or hides windows and toolbars
“Project Sets project properties, adds/removes forms and modules, and
Adds/removes references and components
“Format Aligns or sizes controls
“Debug Starts/stops debugging and stepping through programs

“Run Starts a program, or compiles and starts it
“Tools Adds procedures, starts the Menu Editor, sets IDE options
“Add-Ins Add-in manager, lists add-ins like Application Wizard and API Viewer
“Window Arranges or selects open windows
“Help Handles Help and the About box

One important job of the File menu is to create EXE files for your program.
When you run a program from the Run menu, no EXE file is created; if you
want to run the program outside of Visual Basic, you must create that EXE
file, and you do that with the File menus Make ProjectName.exe item (where
Project Name is the name you’ve set for the project).

We’ll see a great deal more about these menus and the items they contain in the Immediate
Solutions section of this chapter.
1.4.2 The Toolbar
The main Visual Basic toolbar appears in Figure 1.5. This toolbar contains buttons matching
popular menu items, as you can see in Figure 1.5; clicking the button is the same as selecting
a menu item and can save you some time.

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