Microsoft Visual Studio
About MS Visual Studio .NET
MS Visual Studio is Microsoft's flagship software development product for computer programmers. It centers on an integrated development environment which lets programmers create standalone applications, web sites, web applications, and web services.
MSVS was (at one point) my favorite program because it allows you to write Macros and I'm a huge fan of code folding and the ability to right click to go to the definition or declaration.
Installation of .NET 2003
Installation typically done off a CD, the tricky part is that you must do a "prerequisites"... which involves turning on "IIS" and FrontPage extensions.
I managed to lose the MSDN disk unfortunately, but there is help on the Microsoft MSDN site which I use instead.
- Annoying: If you only have one Windows user account then it will no longer log into this automatically - which is really annoying. After the install it creates two extra user accounts: "SQL Debugger" and "ASP.NET Machine A...". The only way I know to get it to log in automatically again is to delete these two accounts.
Shortcuts
The shortcuts I use most:
F5 Start debugging Ctrl+M, Ctrl+H Hide selection Ctrl+M, Ctrl+L Toggle all outlining
A list of all shortcuts is here