Teaching Visual Studio IDE

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kevininstructor

I have been given the task of giving a tour of the Visual Studio 2003 IDE to
in house VB6 developers prior to them (possibly) going to professional
training down the road.



I feel comfortable providing the tour but looking for advice on the order of
information to give to these developers.



For example, one idea is starting with explaining different windows i.e.
code view, solution explorer etc. then what are solutions, projects and
general points on them followed by demonstration on creating a simple
solution with several projects (within this section might be organization
for project directory structure). This is the general idea of my plan.



What I am looking for are suggestions on topics and order but not actual
content. I don't want someone's syllabus but instead an outline which I
could then fill in with my instructions. Even if you don't have one I would
be interested in hearing from seasoned DotNet developers, looking back, what
would you like to have known about the development environment?



Thanks for taking the time to read and respond.

Kevin S. Gallagher
 
I think most VB6 developers won't have trouble adjusting to the IDE. Minor
issues will come up, but they will be able to figure most things out.

I would focus on OOP and the framework during the training.
 
Marina,

Thanks for the response but several of the more seasoned developers fall
into this category while many others requested IDE walkthrough which is why
I am doing it, and not out of a primal need to show off what I know :-)

PS We have a internal group (of Java, VB, ColdFusion, DB2 and .NETTers)
which meets once per week for the past year which addresses OOP without
consideration to programming language.

Kevin
 
"(e-mail address removed)"
<[email protected]>'s wild thoughts were
released on Wed, 20 Jul 2005 14:26:54 -0700 bearing the
following fruit:
Marina,

Thanks for the response but several of the more seasoned developers fall
into this category while many others requested IDE walkthrough which is why
I am doing it, and not out of a primal need to show off what I know :-)
Click to expand...

You need to show VB6 developers where things are in dotnet.
Project Explorer is now the Solution explorer etc.

Then explain what's new about those familiar features.

Then go on to explain new features of the dotnet IDE.

J


PS We have a internal group (of Java, VB, ColdFusion, DB2 and .NETTers)
which meets once per week for the past year which addresses OOP without
consideration to programming language.

Kevin
Click to expand...


Jan Hyde (VB MVP)

--
A man is incomplete until he is married.
After that, he is finished.

(Zsa Zsa Gabor)

[Abolish the TV Licence - http://www.tvlicensing.biz/]
 
There will be a few things they should know cause VB6 IDE is actually better
than the .NET IDE. It will be hard for VB6 developers to do without some
key features they've enjoyed in the past, most noteably:

1. Bookmarks are NOT global to the project/solution
2. Debugger is very limited (show them debug.writeline() in the command
window)
3. Linked help is not as good/accurate - in property window hitting F1
while on a specific property gets you a generic message rather than info
about that property for that specific control type.
4. Check for Updates doesn't actually work
5. MSDN help often will not load the first time, takes two tries
6. Solutions get "confused" sometimes so exit VS.2003 and return will solve
it
7. Turn off Index Services if you do any ASP.NET work.
8. No keyboard equivalent to expand/resize controls
9. Changing from Design/HTML mode is a must and no positioning of cursor to
the current control focus in the HTML view (so use Find Ctrl+F)
10. The IDE is just buggy so be prepared

You may get a lot of resistants from the VB6 developers and some key useful
IDE features don't exist in VS.2003.

Best of luck,

Rob.
 
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