Browsing Classes, Objects, etc.

Question

Question ONE:

I'm still pretty new to .net, but have used Visual Studio for a few recent projects. I'm now working a new project and I was wondering if visual studio had anything built in that would allow you to browse all of the details about a control, etc..

Is MSDN the best place to go for this?

For instance if I wanted to see of all the methods, properties, etc.. Is there anything inside VS?

Question TWO:

Can anyone recommend, books, resources, that deal specificially with Visual Studio? What each window does, etc.. I have used it enough to complete a few projects, but I haven't seen much in the way of exactly what everything does and why.

Thanks for any suggestions.

Answer 1

Use reflector (it's free!) to get in-depth information about classes etc. Visual studio also has a built-in Object Browser.

P.S. Reflector allows you to reverse engineer assemblies as well, allowing you to view the actual code of a class / method.

P.P.S. Google is still a developer's best friend. Need information on a control, search for it on the web. (Which will lead you to MSDN a lot of the times, but will also get you examples and loads of blog entries).

Answer 2

Question ONE:
You can use the Object Browser (menu View\Object Browser) to see a hierarchical list of all known assemblies, classes, interfaces, enums, etc... This only gives the signature of each item and not the code. If you want to see the code, use .Net reflector.

Answer 3

You can also use the Object Browser in Visual Studio. There is usually an icon for it at the top (by the Toolbox, Solution Explorer, etc. icons) or you can navigate to it (View -> Object Browser). When it opens, you will see all of the libraries currently referenced (system and third party) on the left hand side. It's hierarchical, so you can start drilling down. There is a search box at the top, if you want to look for a particular class, method or library. That looks at all the system libraries, not just the ones referenced in your current project.

For more help with the object browser, look here.

Answer 4

Q1:

In Visual Studio:

Above the editor there are 2 dropdown lists:

Left: Shows Classes

Right: Shows Class Members

or Click View > Class View: to see all the classes in the whole solution

Answer 5

I had a similar rub when I started using VS after I had done a lot of Java coding. I was used to the Java API documentation to research properties and such.

I found the VS equivalent IMO, here: http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/ms229335.aspx You can browse every class method, property, constructor, etc. right there. Their examples are decent.

Answer 6

In response to question 1, what I usually do is highlight the bit of framework code I'm interested in and hit F1 to bring up the documentation. For example:

Button myButton = new Button();

If you highlight the first Button and hit F1, you'll get an overview on Buttons in Windows Forms. If you highlight Button() and hit F1 you'll get the documentation on the Button class constructor.

In response to question 2, I'm not sure a book is the answer. I think reading a book on all the components of Visual Studio might be overkill. I'd say to keep on hacking away at your projects and page-fault information in via MSDN, Google, and StackOverflow as you need it. As with any IDE and framework, the more you use it the better you'll get at navigating and learning the ins and outs.