A.4. Object Modeling Tools

At several points in this book, you have been subjected to our personal manifesto that it's better to write code from scratch using only a text editor when you're learning a programming language. When you write code from scratch, there's no IDE to hold your hand, so it's up to you to learn enough about the programming language to get your code to work. It's our experience that this approach gives a deeper understanding of the language—a better connection with it, if you will. You'll also be better prepared to deal with debugging situations when things don't go as planned.

That said, Microsoft has spent a lot of time and effort in developing its Visual Studio IDE and it has become the industry standard .NET Framework IDE. If you want to play around with Visual Studio, you can download a free trial version from the MSDN web site. To get to the free download, go to http://msdn.microsoft.com and click the Visual Studio Express link under the heading Developer Tools and Languages.