Working with Microsoft Visual Studio .NET

Application code generated 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 2005 or 2008. 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:

Page/Panel versus Control/Line of Code: Iron Speed Designer allows you to create a page or panel at a time, while Microsoft Visual Studio allows you to create code one line or one control at a time.
Spreadsheet-like Layout Editor: You can customize the layout of the page using an easy to use spreadsheet-like interface in Iron Speed Designer without having to know HTML or ASPX.
Pre-bound Panels: Drag-and-drop complete, pre-bound panels such as child tables. The SQL query and the relationship with other panels on the page is automatically configured, and a complete layout is created easily.
Pre-bound Controls: Drag-and-drop pre-bound controls from the toolbox. The controls are automatically formatted to use the right ASPX control such as a textbox or dropdown list, and are automatically bound to a field from the database.

Microsoft Visual Studio Benefits:

Debugger: Microsoft Visual Studio has an excellent debugger that allows you to debug code easily. Step through the generated code to understand it line by line, or identify problems in your code.
Intellisense: You can use the full support of Intellisense across all Microsoft .NET libraries and files.
Third-party Controls and Libraries: Incorporate other features such as web services, or use third-party controls or libraries easily using Microsoft Visual Studio.

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

Never orphaned: Modifying the code in Microsoft Visual Studio will never orphan your application from Iron Speed Designer. As long as you follow our recommended guidelines, your changes will always be preserved.
Use Section 1: Place your code customizations in Section 1 of the C# or Visual Basic source code files. Section 2 will be overwritten during the next code generation. You can override any function or method in Section 1 to replace its behavior implemented in Section 2.
ASPX pages: We recommend you use Iron Speed Designer’s Quick Layout Spreadsheet to modify your page layout. You can insert any ASP.NET controls using the Quick Layout Spreadsheet, and you can even drag-and-drop most of the common controls through the toolbox. The ASPX pages are generated from the Quick Layout Spreadsheet. Changes you make to the ASPX pages will be overwritten the next time you regenerate that page.
New pages, new code files: If you want to incorporate new ASPX pages that are not dependent on your database, you can easily do so using Microsoft Visual Studio. Open the application in Microsoft Visual Studio and create the page as you would normally. Similarly, you can add any code files or modules using Microsoft Visual Studio.

Please see the topics below for more information.

Working with Microsoft Visual Studio .NET

See Also