Microsoft Visual Studio (VS) 2005 is a development environment for creating, organizing,
and debugging your programs. VS 2005 organizes your work into solutions and projects.
Solutions
VS 2005 appears as a window on your desktop with multiple panes and several rows of icons.
Each instance of VS 2005 can have only one solution, but there can be multiple instances
of VS 2005 running simultaneously on the same machine. Each solution can have as many
projects as you like. You can see the solution structure using the menu
"View | Solution Explorer". You can pin this panel to a specific place in your
VS 2005 window, use it as a floating window, autohide it or hide it completely.
Projects
There needs to be a separate project for each different library or executable you
intend to build, and you cannot have files containing source code in different
programming languages in the same project. This is a change from earlier versions of
Visual Studio. When you open a solution, all the projects in it become available.
One of the development aids provided by VS 2005 is a GUI editor for source code.
The editor automatically indents loops and branches via tab characters, for example
("prettyprinting"). When it is time for debugging, breakpoints can be set using this
view of the file.
Configurations
It is possible to build different versions of project entities using solution
configurations. A new solution comes with two configurations by default,
Debug and Release. Additional configurations may be created using the Configuration
Manager. It is not necessary to have a different version of each project for each
configuration. The configuration manager allows you, for example, to associate a
generic debug configuration of a library project with a specialized configuration of
a debug executable project.
Platforms
Another dimension of project versions is to build for different platforms. VS 2005
allows for two platforms, IA32 and x64. Currently all of the production machines at
the CTC are running IA32.
GUI for compiling and linking
Under the covers, VS 2005 uses the same compilers that you access from the command
line. It just provides a GUI for choosing among the great variety of options that are
available. When it builds an object for you, VS 2005 invokes the command-line compiler
with the appropriate (often lengthy) option string. It also provides you with some
capabilities of the Unix "make" command through its solutions and projects. It allows
you to make some projects "dependent" on other projects so that as an executable is
built, those projects on which it depends get rebuilt if they are out of date.
Compatibility with Microsoft Visual Studio 7
In this module we describe version 8 of Microsoft Visual Studio. An older version,
Microsoft Visual Studio 7.1 (Microsoft Visual Studio .Net 2003), is still available
on the login nodes and in the collaboratory. If you double-click on a Microsoft
Visual Studio 7.1 Solution (.sln) file, it will be converted to the new format and
opened in Visual Studio 2005. You will no longer be able to open this solution with
Visual Studio .Net 2003, so it is a good idea to save a copy of your solution before
converting it, just in case there are problems with the conversion.
