Introducing Visual Studio .NET In the previous sections, you saw programs that connect to various databases, retrieve a row from a table, and display the column values for that row on your computer screen. | Introducing Visual Studio .NET In the previous sections you saw programs that connect to various databases retrieve a row from a table and display the column values for that row on your computer screen. This type of program is known as a console application because it displays output directly on the screen on which the program is running. You can use Visual Studio .NET VS .NET to create console applications as well as the following types of applications Windows Applications These take advantage of the visual controls offered by the Windows operating system such as menus buttons and editable text boxes. Windows Explorer which you use to navigate the file system of your computer is one example. You ll learn about Windows programming in Chapter 6 Introducing Windows Applications and . Applications These run over the Internet. You access an application using a Web browser such as Internet Explorer. Examples of applications would be online banking stock trading or auction systems. You ll learn about programming in Chapter 15 Introducing Web Applications . Web Services These also run over the Internet. Also known as XML Web services the difference is that you can use them to offer a service that could be used in a distributed system of interconnected services. For example Microsoft s Passport Web service offers identification and authentication of Web users you could then use in your own Web application. You ll learn about Web services in Chapter 17 Web Services. This is not an exhaustive list of the types of applications you can develop with VS .NET but it does give you flavor for the broad range of VS .NET s capabilities. In the rest of this section you ll see how to develop and run a console application using VS .NET. If you ve installed VS .NET on your computer you ll be able to follow along with the example. If you don t have VS .NET don t worry you ll still be able to see what s going on from the figures .
