Demoted

With Windows XP, I find I don’t need to reinstall my system as often as I did with previous versions. As a result there are large gaps between each installation of Visual Studio and my memory fades during this time.

One of the decisions to be made when you run a fresh install of Visual Studio for the first time is how you want the environment to be configured: General Development, Visual Basic, Visual C#, etc. Your choice here will determine default window positions, menu and toolbar items and keyboard shortcuts among other things. Each time I am faced with this decision I am not sure what I chose last time. Should I use the Visual Basic settings to suit my preferred language or should I use General Development settings so the environment is ready for me to jump around between languages and project types?

When I installed Visual Studio 2005 in November I chose Visual Basic and I have since been annoyed by the difficulty in finding the Build Configuration Manager and the quick Debug/Release chooser on the toolbar. I had assumed that this was a simple change in the UI for VS2005 so I customised the menus and toolbar to include the missing items. I intended to blog about this problem when I first noticed but it was delayed until now.

I was reminded the other day when, wandering through the .NET documentation, I stumbled across a couple of articles about hidden debug commands in the IDE. I was shocked to read that the build menus and toolbars are limited only when Visual Basic is chosen for the environment configuration. Considering in VS2005, Microsoft brought the VB language much more into line with C# and introduced low-end Express Editions for beginners, I was surprised they decided to take a step backwards and hide build configurations from VB users in the Professional version. Just when I thought Visual Basic had been promoted to a first-class language in the .NET range!

For anyone else who was baffled by this change in the new version, here is the MSDN article explaining how to get control of your builds back.