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Tour the Visual Studio IDE

In this introduction to the Visual Studio integrated development environment (IDE), you take a tour of some of the windows, menus, and other UI features.

To develop any type of app or learn a language, you work in the Visual Studio Integrated Development Environment (IDE). Beyond code editing, Visual Studio IDE brings together graphical designers, compilers, code completion tools, source control, extensions and many more features in one place.

Download and install

To get started, download Visual Studio and install it on your system.

In the Visual Studio Installer, you choose and install workloads, which are groups of features you need for the programming languages or platforms you want. To follow along this article, be sure to select the .NET desktop development workload during installation.

Screenshot of the .NET desktop development workload selected in the Visual Studio Installer.

If you already have Visual Studio, you can add the .NET desktop development workload as follows:

  • Launch the Visual Studio Installer.
  • If prompted, allow the installer to update itself.
  • If an update for Visual Studio is available, an Update button is shown. Select it to update before modifying the installation.
  • Find your Visual Studio installation and select the Modify button.
  • If not selected already, select the .NET desktop development workload and select the Modify button. Otherwise, just close the dialog window.

Create your project

To explore Visual Studio's features, let's create a new project.

Build your app

Let's build the project to see some build output. The Output window shows output messages from building your project and from your source control provider.

From the Build menu, choose Build Solution. The Output window automatically obtains focus and shows a successful build message.

Run your app

Debug your app

Visual Studio has many built-in debugging capabilities. Set a break point at any point of interest in the code to pause the execution of code or to debug step-by-step. Check out the Locals, Autos, and Watch window for troubleshooting the code by inspecting the values at each stage.

Related content

You looked at just a few of the features of Visual Studio to get acquainted with the user interface. To explore further:

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