Working with Microsoft Visual Studio .NET

Application code created by Iron Speed Designer is designed to work directly with Microsoft Visual Studio .NET.  Iron Speed Designer creates standard Microsoft .NET applications that can also be opened and modified using Microsoft Visual Studio.  While there is no requirement to use Microsoft Visual Studio or even have it installed on your machine, you can benefit from using Microsoft Visual Studio for customizing code in certain cases.  Each product has its benefits and they complement each other in a number of ways such as:

Iron Speed Designer Benefits:

Microsoft Visual Studio Benefits:

When developing with Microsoft Visual Studio, we recommend the following:

Please see the topics below for more information.

Opening an Application in Visual Studio .NET

Follow these steps to open an Iron Speed Designer-created application in Microsoft Visual Studio:

Step 1: In Microsoft Visual Studio .NET, select File, Open, Web Site...

Step 2:  Select an application folder and click Open button.

Enabling and Disabling Strict Compilation Mode

You can enable or disable ‘strict mode’ compilation in Visual Studio .NET.  Locate the CompileApplication.rsp file in your application folder:

...\<App Folder>\CompileApplication.rsp

CompileApplication.rsp may contain the “optionstrict” tag.  To enable strict mode, change this setting to:

/optionstrict+

To disable strict mode, change the setting to:

/optionstrict-

Compiling Applications in Debug Mode

Iron Speed Designer creates a standard .NET application so you can use the debugging features of Microsoft Visual Studio .NET to debug your applications.

Note: Visual Studio .NET requires an application resident on the local machine for debugging purposes.

Step 1:  Open your application in Visual Studio .NET.

Step 2:  In Microsoft Visual Studio, open the Configuration Manager dialog (Build, Configuration Manager).

Step 3:  Select a <New...> Active Solution Configuration.

Step 4:  Give it a name such as "Debug", and click "OK".

Visual Basic .NET applications

In the Solution Explorer, right-click the solution’s name and select Properties.  Then, select the Configuration Properties and the Build option in this group.  You will notice a check box titled ‘Generate Debugging Information’ in the panel to the right.  Make sure you check this control.

C# applications

In the Solution Explorer, right-click the solution’s name and select Properties.  Select the Configuration Properties and the Build option in this group.  You will notice a property titled ‘Generate Debugging Information’ in the panel to the right. Make sure the value for this property is set to ‘True’

Step 5: Click the "Close" button in Configuration Manager.  Notice that the project can now be compiled in "Debug" mode via Visual Studio .NET.

Step 6:  Change your application’s Web.config file for debugging mode:

<compilation defaultLanguage="c#" debug="true" />

or

<compilation defaultLanguage="vb" debug="true" />

Set compilation debug="true" to insert debugging symbols (.pdb information) into the compiled page.  Because this creates a larger file that executes more slowly, you should set this value to true only when debugging and to false at all other times.  For more information, refer to the documentation about debugging ASP.NET files.

Note:  For faster performance, we recommend your application be compiled in Release mode.

See Also

Working with Microsoft Visual Studio .NET

Editing ASPX Pages in Visual Studio .NET

Making DLLs CLS Compliant

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