How To Use This Book

This book is intended for developers whose primary development tool is either Microsoft^® Visual Basic^® or Microsoft^® Visual C++^®, but who are interested in learning about the other tools in the Visual Studio suite. This book provides a synthesis of material that is distributed throughout the MSDN library. Managers and those who evaluate tools might also find this book of interest.

Finding Information Fast

This book provides overviews of the tools in the Professional Edition of the Visual Studio suite. You can read either general information about the tools or more specific information about the way the tools support fast development, Web applications, and data-centric applications.

• For general overviews of each tool, see What's in the Professional Edition in this chapter.
• If you are interested in working faster yet more productively, see Tools for Fast Development in Chapter 2 for a summary of what Visual Studio provides to help you.
• If you want to build an application for your company intranet or for the Internet, see Tools for Web Applications in Chapter 2 for a look at what the different Visual Studio tools offer to support Web application development.
• If you want to build a data-centric application — that is, an application whose purpose is querying a database and returning the results — see Tools for Data-Centric Applications in Chapter 2 for a summary of the support offered by each Visual Studio tool for data-centric applications.
• If you want more information about the Island Hopper News sample application, which showcases how to build a distributed application using Microsoft tools and technologies, see The Island Hopper News Sample in Chapter 3.
• For definitions of unfamiliar terms, see the Enterprise Glossary online in MSDN Library Visual Studio 6.0.