Inside Visual Studio.NET (7) _ Practical Tips

Edit Environment

Visual Studio provides a single code editor for all vs.net supported languages while providing specific functionality for each language. Its editor introduces some enhancements to the editing environment, such as word completion, incremental search, code highlighting, indented text, tagged line numbers, color printing, and shortcuts. The editor also provides a number of features designed for a particular language, such as the ability to automate the input of these strings when you enter prototypes and function calls.

In addition to programming languages, this editor provides support for HTML documents, Web pages, and even XML authoring processes. In fact, I'm happy to load one of my XML documents into vs.net and see the keyword metaphor XML declarations and attributes that I use in XML are highlighted. Further, the editor also provides a view of the source code and data. In the data view, the structure of the document is displayed in the left window. When you select an XML element in the cascaded structure, the right part of the window displays its child elements and allows you to drill down into the element data. It's a very cool! function. But I also found an anomaly that not all XML documents can be loaded into the data view. Documents with unpredictable structures appear to confuse editors when they are loaded into a data view.

Another surprise of Visual Studio. NET is that you can create an XML schema from a single document instance. Opens the document instance, and a document source view appears by default. You can stay in the source program view or you can switch to the Data view, and then right-click on the view and choose Create Scheme from the pop-up menu. Once the XML schema has been created, a reference to it is inserted into the original document instance. For those who don't want to spend their time writing XML solutions from scratch, Visual Studio. NET allows you to get your work done quickly.