Find a guide to using an Interactive Development Environment

[Curious Gorge]

I can program with C++ though I'm just a novice at it. I'm using Microsoft's Visual Studio Express 2010 but I don't entirely understand what I'm doing. I can use a library after a great order of frustration but I would like to make this easier.

Are there any web based guides or books to using an IDE such as VSE 2010? If so can somebody give me a link? I think knowing how to use this thing would be very helpful in learning to use other IDE's. I've looked at Microsoft's Website a bit but Microsoft does not document anything very well anymore and there's a billion links to sort through.

Maybe it would be a good idea to try a different language and learn from there. I knew Visual Basic .Net at one point though I haven't used it in years. I'd just like to make something complete and useful, something I can show my friends. I don't think C++ fulfils that very easily.

I wasn't sure where to put this, there doesn't seem to be an accurate forum for it. I just thought you guys would know about this and could be helpful.

[Ancient Dragon]

Here are some books that may help you. Experience is probably the best teacher. IMO most of the features of Visual Studio are just fluff, the best and most useful feature is it's debugger. One feature I don't like is it's dockable windows -- I'm always accidently undocking one of them and spend a lot of time and effort trying to put it back the way it was. I wish there was a way to lock all those windows in place so that they can't be moved.

You might want to upgrade to Visual Studio 2013 Express. It's c++ compiler more closely implements c++ standards than earlier versions.

[rubberman]

Two popular multi-platform IDE's for software development are Eclipse and Code::Blocks. I have quite a bit of experience with Eclipse and little with C::B, but I have heard a lot about it. I did install it once, and decided that if I wanted an IDE I would use Eclipse. Myself, I prefer a good programming editor, make tools, and compilers.

[jwenting]

Visual Studio has a lot of very useful features, but most only become useful in fairly large products with multiple developers working on it as a team, and of course a lot of things only come into play for specific types of applications like web applications.

[Curious Gorge]

You know I found the answer to this question myself. It was on microsoft's website of all places! xD

I've been searching for this information since forever ago. In case anyone else was wondering about this to I have a link here: http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/vstudio/669zx6zc%28v=vs.60%29

There's also good documentation on what the various windows do in VS on Microsoft's website too. I ended up searching for them in the search bar and found this and the guide to the GUI.