the mouse remains over the expanded window, it stays put, but if you move the mouse off the window, it auto-hides itself again (like a cockroach when you turn on the lights). Select Auto Hide again or click the sideways thumbtack to turn off auto-hiding. Auto-hiding gets windows out of the way so you can work in a bigger editing area.
● Hide– The window disappears completely. To get the window back, you'll need to find it somewhere in the bewildering assortment of menus. You can find many of the most useful windows in the View menu, the View menu's Other Windows submenu, and the Debug menu's Windows submenu.
The thumbtack in a window's title bar works just like the dropdown menu's Auto Hide command does. Click the thumbtack to turn on auto-hiding. Expand the window and click the sideways thumbtack to turn off auto-hiding. (Turning off auto-hiding is sometimes called pinning the window.)
The (
In addition to using a window's title bar menu and icons, you can drag windows into new positions. As long as a window is dockable or part of a tabbed window, you can grab its title bar and drag it to a new position.
As you drag the window, the IDE displays little drop targets to let you dock the window in various positions. If you move the window so the mouse is over a drop target, the IDE displays a translucent blue area to show where the window will land if you drop it. If you drop when the mouse is not over a drop target, the window becomes floating.
Figure 1.8 shows the Properties window being dragged in the IDE. The mouse is over the right drop target above the editing area so, as the translucent blue area shows, dropping it there would dock the window to the right side of the editing area. The picture is kind of messy, but it's not too hard to see what's going on if you give it a try.
The drop area just to the left of the mouse represents a tabbed area. If you drop on this kind of target, the window becomes a tab in that area.
Customization Moderation
Visual Studio lets you move, dock, float, hide, auto-hide, and tabify windows. If you have multiple monitors, you can float a window and move it to another monitor, giving you a larger editing area. It's so flexible that it can present as many different faces as a politician during an election year.
Feel free to customize the IDE to suit your needs, but if you do, keep in mind that your version of Visual Studio may look nothing like the pictures in this book. To minimize confusion, you may want to keep the IDE looking more or less like Figure 1.7, at least until you get a better sense of which tools will be most useful to you.
Try It
In this Try It, you prepare for later work throughout the book. You locate web resources that you can use when you have questions or run into trouble. You create and run a program, explore the project's folder hierarchy, and make a copy of the project. You also get a chance to experiment a bit with the IDE, displaying new toolbars, moving windows around, and generally taking the IDE for a test drive and kicking the tires.
NOTE
Note that the solutions for this lesson's Try It and exercises are not all available on the book's website. The Try It and some of the exercises ask you to experiment with the IDE rather than produce a finished program, so there's really nothing to download. In later lessons, example solutions to the Try It and exercises are available on the book's website.
In this lesson, you:
● Find and bookmark useful web resources.
● Launch Visual Studio and start a new Visual C# project.
● Experiment with the IDE's layout by displaying the Debug toolbar, pinning the Toolbox, and displaying the Output window.
● Run the program.
● Find the program's executable, copy it to the desktop, and run it there.
● Copy the project folder to a new location and make changes to the copy.
● Compress the project folder to make a backup.
NOTE
You can download the code and resources for this lesson from the website at www.wrox.com/go/csharp24hourtrainer2e.
● When you create a new project, be sure to specify a good location so you can find it later.
● Before you compress the project, remove the bin, obj, and .vs directories to save space.
● Find and bookmark useful web resources.
1. Open your favorite web browser.
2. Create a new bookmark folder named C#. (See the browser's documentation if you don't know how to make a bookmark folder.)
3. Go to the following websites and bookmark the ones you like (feel free to search for others, too):
● My C# Helper website (www.CSharpHelper.com)
● This book's web page (www.CSharpHelper.com/24hour.html)
● This book's Wrox web page (go to www.wrox.com and search for C# 24-Hour Trainer, Second Edition)
● Visual C# Express Edition MSDN forum (social.msdn.microsoft.com/Forums/en-US/Vsexpressvcs/threads)
● Visual C# IDE MSDN forum (social.msdn.microsoft.com/Forums/en-US/csharpide/threads)
● Visual C# Language MSDN forum (social.msdn.microsoft.com/Forums/en-US/csharplanguage/threads)
● Visual C# General MSDN forum (social.msdn.microsoft.com/Forums/en-US/csharpgeneral/threads)
● MSDN (msdn.microsoft.com)
● Stack Overflow (www.stackoverflow.com)
● Code Project (www.codeproject.com)
● Launch Visual Studio and start a new Visual C# project.
1. If you don't have a desktop or taskbar icon for Visual Studio, create one. For example, in Windows
