Visual Studio is Microsoft’s Integrated Development Environment (IDE) for creating, running and debugging apps written in a variety of .NET programming languages.

Creating simple apps by dragging and dropping predefined building blocks into place is called visual app development.

The Start Page contains links to Visual Studio IDE resources and web-based resources.

A project is a group of related files that compose a app.

Visual Studio organizes apps into projects and solutions. A solution may contain one or more projects.

Dialogs are windows that facilitate user–computer communication.

Visual Studio provides templates for the project types you can create.

A Form represents the main window of the Windows Forms app that you’re creating.

Collectively, the Form and controls constitute the app’s graphical user interface (GUI), which is the visual part of the app with which the user interacts.

Commands for managing the IDE and for developing, maintaining and executing apps are contained in the menus, which are located on the menu bar.

Menus contain groups of commands (menu items) that, when selected, cause the IDE to perform actions (for example, open a window, save a file, print a file and execute an app).

Tool tips help you become familiar with the IDE’s features.

The Solution Explorer window lists all the files in the solution.

The Toolbox contains controls for customizing Forms.

By using visual app development, you can place predefined controls onto the Form instead of writing the code yourself.

Clicking an auto-hidden window’s name opens that window. Clicking the name again hides it. To “pin down” a window (that is, to disable auto-hide), click its pin icon.

The Properties window displays the properties for a Form, control or file (in Design view). Properties are information about a Form or control, such as size, color and position. The Properties window allows you to modify Forms and controls visually, without writing code.

Each control has its own set of properties. The left column of the Properties window shows the property names and the right column displays the property values. This window’s toolbar contains options for organizing properties alphabetically when the Alphabetical icon is selected or categorically (for example, Appearance, Behavior, Design) when the Categorized icon is selected.

Extensive help documentation is available via the Help menu.

Context-sensitive help brings up a list of relevant help articles. To use context-sensitive help, select an item and press the F1 key.

Visual C# app development usually involves a combination of writing a portion of the app code and having Visual Studio generate the remaining code.

The text that appears at the top of the Form (the title bar) is specified in the Form’s Text property.

To resize the Form, click and drag one of the Form’s enabled sizing handles (the small squares around the Form). Enabled sizing handles appear as white boxes.

The BackColor property specifies the background color of a Form. The Form’s background color is the default background color for any controls added to the Form.

Double clicking any Toolbox control icon places a control of that type on the Form. Alternatively, you can drag and drop controls from the Toolbox to the Form.

The Label’s Text property determines the text (if any) that the Label displays. The Form and Label each have their own Text property.

A property’s ellipsis button, when clicked, displays a dialog containing additional options.

In the Font dialog, you can select the font for text in the user interface.

The TextAlign property determines how the text is aligned within a Label’s boundaries.

The PictureBox control displays images. The Image property specifies the image to displayed.

An app that is in design mode is not executing.

In run mode, the app is executing—you can interact with only a few IDE features.

When designing an app visually, the name of the Visual C# file appears in the project tab, followed by [Design].

Terminate an app’s execution by clicking its close box.