Downloading and Installing Visual Studio

Everything you need to build Visual Basic applications is included with Microsoft Visual Studio. At the time of publication of this book the latest release of Visual Studio is Visual Studio 2005. The first step in learning Visual Basic is, therefore, to obtain a copy of Visual Studio.

Getting Visual Studio

There are a number of obtions in terms of getting a copy of Visual Studio. If you work for a company which has Visual Studio licenses available then the first step is to talk to your IT department to see if they can provide you with a license, or purchase one for you.

If you do not have access to a purchase Visual Studio license, or lack the funds to buy a copy the best option, and actually the ideal option for those learning Visual Basic, is to download a trial version from Microsoft's web site. This will give you a 90 day trial period to use all the features of Visual Studio. Given that this book will teach you everything you need to know to program in Visual Basic the 90 day trial period will give you plenty of time to learn Visual Basic with time to spare to decide if you want purchase a fully licensed copy of Visual Studio.

In this chapter of Visual Basic Essentials we will assume that you are downloading and installing the trail version of Visual Studio.

Downloading a Visual Studio Trial

To work through the examples in this book, Visual Studio Professional Edition is recommended.

Trial copies of Microsoft Visual Studio Professional Edition are available from the trials page of the Microsoft web site. From this page, you can choose to download a trial, or order a trial DVD.

The download is approximately 2.7Gb in size so will take quite a while to download. Also, the download is an ISO image of the Visual Studio installation DVD so a DVDN burner will be needed to write the image to a disk befoe it can be used for installation.

If you do not have a high speed internet connection or a DVD writer, Microsoft will ship you a free DVD (although they will charge you a small fee to cover the shipping costs).