Wednesday Featured Forums: Visual Studio Languages Forum
Good Day All!
We are back with the Wednesday's Featured Forums where we write about a Microsoft forum that we think is great. Today we will be looking at Visual Studio Languages Forum.
Lets learn first what is Visual Studio? Microsoft Visual Studio is an integrated development environment (IDE) from Microsoft. It is used to develop computer programs, as well as web sites, web apps, web services and mobile apps. It uses Microsoft software development platforms such as Windows API, Windows Forms, Windows Presentation Foundation, Windows Store and Microsoft Silverlight. It can produce both native code and managed code.
Visual Studio includes a code editor supporting different programming languages like C++/CLI, Visual Basic .NET, C#, F#, JavaScript, TypeScript and many more. But is does not support any programming language, solution or tool intrinsically; instead, it allows the plugging of functionality coded as a VSPackage. When installed, the functionality is available as a Service.
Then support for programming languages is added by using a specific VSPackage called a Language Service. A language service defines various interfaces which the VSPackage implementation can implement to add support for various functionalities. Functionalities that can be added this way include syntax coloring, statement completion, brace matching, parameter information tooltips, member lists and error markers for background compilation. If the interface is implemented, the functionality will be available for the language. Language services are implemented on a per-language basis.
This is one of the most widely used MSDN forum and it contains Question and Answer related to programming languages:
- Visual C#
- Visual Basic
- Visual C++
- C++ Standards, Extensions and Interop
- Parallel Computing in C++ and Native Code
- Visual F#
Among these forums Visual C# forum contains 108425 pages and Visual Basic forum contains 85781 pages of questions and answers which is big! Lets look about what is these forums about:
Visual C# : C# is an elegant and type-safe object-oriented language that enables developers to build a variety of secure and robust applications that run on the .NET Framework. C# can be use to create Windows client applications, XML Web services, distributed components, client-server applications, database applications, and much, much more.
C# syntax is highly expressive, yet it is also simple and easy to learn. The curly-brace syntax of C# will be instantly recognizable to anyone familiar with C, C++ or Java. Developers who know any of these languages are typically able to begin to work productively in C# within a very short time.
Visual Basic: Visual Basic is regarded as the third generation event-driven programming language. As compared to other languages, Visual basic may be slower though, yet it is flexible and it can be rightly said that things that are difficult in other languages are comparatively easier in visual basic programming language. Visual Basic is mostly used in legacy code bases.
Now that we have a brief overview let's move to the Visual Studio Languages Forums. To access the forums you can click on the link below:
One of the feature you can see is that in each forum page there is a sticky sections on the first page where you can find:
- Solution related to some common question
- Reference to tutorial materials
- Best practices and other information
That is all for now. Good Luck!
Thanks,
-Ninja Sabah