What's New in the Visual Studio IDE for Visual Basic 6.0 Users

Article
09/03/2015

At first glance, the Visual Basic 2008 integrated development environment (IDE) may seem unfamiliar, but as you start to use it, you will find that it has many new features that make you more productive. This page highlights some of the biggest changes and provides links to in-depth information.

Note

If you are familiar with Visual Basic 6.0, see Integrated Development Environment for Visual Basic 6.0 Users.

Tip

For a hands-on introduction to new features in Visual Basic 2008, see Visual Basic Guided Tour.

What's New

The following are a few of the new IDE features in Visual Basic 2008.

Shared IDE

All of the .NET languages, including Visual Basic, Visual C#, Visual C++ and more, are hosted within the Visual Studio IDE. Sharing a single IDE provides many benefits, including consolidating similar tools from the various products into a set of shared tools used throughout Visual Studio.

Window Management

Visual Studio makes it easier than ever to view more of your code on-screen at one time.

Tabbed documents automatically tab document windows together within the IDE. For example, when you edit multiple documents in an editor or designer, the documents all appear in the multiple-document interface (MDI) area as tabs at the top.

Auto Hide allows you to minimize tool windows such as Solution Explorer and the Toolbox along the edges of the IDE so that the windows do not occupy valuable space. By minimizing tool windows, you can increase the viewable space of the editor.

For more information, see Window Management.

Editing Features

Visual Studio now has a unified Code Editor for all languages in the IDE; it includes specialized features for each language. The Code Editor has several enhancements, such as word wrap, incremental search, code outlining, collapse to definition, line numbering, color printing, and shortcuts. You can access these features from the Edit or context menus.

Code Snippets are segments of sample code ready to insert into Visual Basic projects. To display a list of available code snippets, right-click the active document in the Code Editor and then click Insert Snippet on the shortcut menu. Click the name of the snippet you want, and the code is inserted into the editor, ready for you to modify as needed. For more information, see How to: Manage Code Snippets.

Similar to Office smart tags, Visual Studio smart tags make common tasks available that apply to the context of your work. For example, using smart tags, you can now correct some common errors in Visual Basic with a click of a button.

Deployment

ClickOnce deployment allows you to deploy self-updating Windows-based applications that can be installed and run as easily as Web applications. You can deploy Windows client and command-line applications. There is a new Publish Project command on the Project menus. For more information, see ClickOnce Deployment.

You can now include required system components, such as the .NET Framework runtime, as a part of a deployment project or ClickOnce deployment. For more information, see Deploying Prerequisites (Visual Studio).

Using Setup and Deployment projects, you can distribute applications using Microsoft Windows Installer technology, deploy to production and staging servers, deploy tiers of your application to different test computers, and deploy ASP.NET Web applications to Web servers. For more information, see Windows Installer Deployment.

Microsoft Build Engine

The Microsoft Build Engine (MSBuild) is the new build platform for Microsoft and Visual Studio. MSBuild introduces a new XML-based project file format that is simple to understand, easy to extend, and fully supported by Microsoft. The MSBuild project file format enables developers to fully describe what items need to be built, as well as how they need to be built, with different platforms and configurations. In addition, the project file format enables developers to author re-usable rules that can be factored into separate files so that builds can be done consistently across different projects within their product. For more information, see MSBuild.

What's New in the Visual Studio IDE for Visual Basic 2005

In this version of Visual Studio, new IDE features in Visual Basic 2008 include predefined settings, task list and error list enhancements, improved docking behavior, the IDE Navigator window, and much more.