What's New in the Visual Studio Professional Edition

   

Developing for Windows and the Web: Guide to Visual Studio, Professional Edition

This book included with the Visual Studio, Professional Edition, is intended to help you discover the possibilities in each Microsoft® Visual Studio™ tool, by describing what you can do with each tool and pointing you to product samples and documentation. This book also introduces the Island Hopper News sample application at a high level. Its chapters provide brief overviews of the Visual Studio tools; a look at each Visual Studio tool in terms of its support for fast development, Web applications, and data-centric applications; and a description of the Island Hopper News sample application. Includes information about the pieces of the sample and how those pieces fit together.

See Developing for Windows and the Web: Guide to Visual Studio, Professional Edition, for more information.

Solution Building and Packaging

With the Microsoft development environment (for Visual J++ and Visual InterDev) you can create three types of packages for your projects. With this packaging, you can distribute an application on the Web or use a standard installation program. You can choose from three different kinds of packaging projects: a setup executable, a Microsoft cabinet, or a Zip Archive file. You can digitally sign your setup or cabinet projects for added security by attaching certificates in the development environment.

See Solution Building and Packaging Reference for a complete reference on building and packaging solutions with the Microsoft development environment.

Deployment

With the Microsoft development environment (for Microsoft® Visual J++™ and Microsoft® Visual InterDev™), you can deploy your projects to Web servers for testing and production. You can set up more than one target machine to deploy to, and arrange your files in the Deployment Explorer to match the needs of those configurations.

See Solution Deployment Reference for a complete reference on deploying solutions with the Microsoft development environment.

Visual Component Manager

The Visual Component Manager (VCM) provides a single source, working in conjunction with Visual Studio development environments, to organize, find, and insert components into your project. You can use VCM as your central location for cataloging approved functional components, project programming conventions, functional specifications, and architectural models and diagrams. It offers a flexible keyword and search feature and the ability to automatically register COM components you reuse through it.

Visual Component Manager Reference introduces the Visual Component Manager documentation, providing links to concepts, common tasks, and other reference topics.