The Many Toolbars
Visual Studio 2015 includes close to 30 toolbars in just the professional edition. If you use a set of commands often, there is a good chance that there is a matching toolbar to group those commands. As a result, a large percentage of the toolbars are highly specialized. For example, if you are working with the Class Designer, you use the Class Designer toolbar to manage classes or change screen magnification. Or if you are building a SQL Query, you use the Query Designer toolbar. We do not cover each of these toolbars here because they are highly specialized. Instead, we stick to a quick tour to cover the common ground.
The Standard Toolbar
The Standard toolbar is present at all times during your IDE sessions (unless, of course, you customize things or turn it off). It provides quick access to all the commands you use over and over. The standard commands are on the top left: Back and Forward, Create New Project, Open File, Save, and Save All. These are followed by Undo and Redo. Figure 2.18 shows the Standard toolbar in the IDE.
Tip
We suggest you learn the keyboard equivalents for such standard commands as cut, copy, paste, undo, and the like. In fact, most standard toolbar items have a shortcut you should learn. You can then remove many of these toolbar icons from the toolbar to save precious screen real estate for commands that have you reaching for the mouse anyway (and have harder-to-remember shortcut keys). Keep in mind that toolbars can, and will, change configurations depending on the project type currently loaded in the IDE.
The button to the right of the undo/redo commands allow you to set your build type (Debug or Release). The next button allows you to configure your build by CPU. The button with the green start arrow is often called the Debug or Play button. This button looks different depending on your project type (in this case, a web project). This initiates a build of your project and launches it under the debugger control. In the example shown in Figure 2.18, you also have the option to select the default, debug browser (Chrome in this case). The last button on the right provides an option for initiating a search within your code files. This capability can be handy for quickly finding the place where you left off or the place you are looking for. Finally, to the right of this is a drop-down that enables you to add buttons to or remove them from the Standard toolbar. As you will see later, you can, in fact, customize any of the toolbars in the IDE.