On the Start Page of Visual Studio, you will see the following panes: You can always change these settings, as explained at the end of this section. I’m assuming that you have initially selected the Visual Basic Development settings, which will optimize your copy of Visual Studio for building Windows and web applications with Visual Basic 2008. When you run Visual Studio 2008 for the first time, you will be prompted to select the type of projects you plan to build with Visual Studio, so that the environment can be optimized for that specific type of development. The IDE is your second desktop, and you’ll be spending most of your productive hours in this environment.

You’ll learn how its tools allow you to quickly design the user interface of your application, as well as how to program the application. In this section, you’ll look at the basic components of the IDE needed to build simple Windows applications. It will be a while before you explore all the elements of the IDE, and I will explain the various items as needed in the course of the tutorial.

If (UCase$(ProcessName) = 'VB6.EXE') Then IfUsingVB6IDE = True 'if current process VB6.The IDE provides tools for designing, executing, and debugging your applications. ProcessNameLen = GetModuleBaseNameA(ProcessHandle, App.hInstance, NameBuffer, PROCESS_NAME_MAX_BYTES) 'Get current Process Base module name (file name) ProcessHandle = GetCurrentProcess() 'Get Current Process pseudo handle Private Property Get IfUsingVB6IDE() As Booleanĭim NameBuffer As String * PROCESS_NAME_MAX_BYTES Private Const PROCESS_NAME_MAX_BYTES As Long = 255

Private Declare Function GetCurrentProcess Lib 'kernel32' () As Long Private Declare Function GetModuleBaseNameA Lib 'Psapi.dll' (ByVal hProcess As Long, ByVal hModule As Long, ByVal lpFileName As String, ByVal nSize As Long) As Long

Visual basic ide