Visual Studio - Definition and Overview

Microsoft Visual Studio is a series of IDEs 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 WebDev
• Microsoft SQL Server

In the past, the following products were included:

• 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 xBase programming language now allied to but independent from the Visual Studio platform.

Major Visual Studio versions include:

• Visual Studio 5.0
• Visual Studio 6.0 (still popular with VB6 developers who can not shift to VB.NET)
• Visual Studio .NET (.NET Framework 1.0)
• Visual Studio .NET 2003 (.NET Framework 1.1)
• Visual Studio .NET 2005, code named "Whidbey" (currently in beta)
• Visual Studio 2005 Express (currently in beta)
• Visual Studio 2005 Team System (pre-beta)

Visual Studio 2006 will be released at the same time as Windows Longhorn, it currently is code named Orcas.

See also

• Visual SourceSafe

External links

• Microsoft's Visual Studio product page (http://msdn.microsoft.com/vstudio/)
• Microsoft's Visual Studio 2005 Express Beta page (http://lab.msdn.microsoft.com/express/)
• Microsoft's Visual Studio Team System page (http://msdn.microsoft.com/vstudio/teamsystem/default.aspx)

Example Usage of Visual