Visual C++ instruction manual?

[hanst99]

Is there such thing as a VC++ reference manual or online guide? I mean one that's purely dedicated to explain how to use the IDE, not a beginners guide to programming - I have found plenty of those already while searching for one.

[freddie1]

I sympathize with you hanst99! In my opinion Visual Studio is terribly complicated and a poor choice for a beginner to start with. Because its free (Express Edition) and professional programmers use it, its usually recommended to beginners, who are then not only faced with learning a difficult programming language, i.e., C++, but also an extremely complicated working environment. Maybe its a 'tough love' sort of thing; or maybe a means of weeding out those who aren't heavily motivated and inspired.

So I wish I could answer you but I can't. The only words of encouragement I can offer is to gradually experiment and explore the various settings and don't think you're dumb or anything. Its really complicated. And I've been using Visual Studio since like version 5 back in the mid nineties, and DOS versions before that.

For reasons such as this I don't really think its a bad thing to start out with Dev-Cpp even though its technically somewhat dated. Once you get some expertise and confidence you can always move up to something difficult and nasty to use - such as Visual Studio!

[matsom]

I remembered Jeff Prosise's Programming Windows with MFC not only taught its readers MFC but also howto's in navigating Visual Studio 6 options and menus -can't find any equivalent books/authors that managed to do the same with modern Visual Studio versions though.

The way I usually work with MS products is ignoring all the menus/buttons/ribbons (blerghh) and find and remember those I needed to make the damn thing work -and this is true whether I'm using Word or Visual C# Express :-/

[modoran]

If you have any other edition of VS other than Express the offline documentation is already included in the ISO image you downloaded (for vs2010 it is more than 2GB of documentation describing how to use visual studio and complete windows api reference.)
To access it just click Help -> View help.

[hanst99]

I have the express version, and I am currently trying to find out how to actually get the debugger to do it's job... I just can't seem to find out how to really use the debugger (sure, I can set breakpoints and do the stepping and stuff, but there are like a billion options I can't figure out).

Oh also I heard that there is a resource editor in VS - I can however only seem to find an option to create CLR forms (I want to stay native). If VC++ doesn't have a resource editor, can you please recommend me a good one? I tried using ResEdit for a while, but got fed up with it because it only seemed to be able to work with global include directories.

[naraku9333]

I know you can add resources with View->Resource View, I would assume you could edit them too.

EDIT:
This page looks like its got info for native project resource files
http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/zabda143.aspx

EDIT2:
Through further searching it appears express editions do not include resource editor, so I guess only options are external editor or if you have a valid .edu email you can get vs2010 pro from http://dreamspark.com free.

[hanst99]

Editing ressources is not supported by the visual c++ express sku

(translated that myself, so it might be inaccurate).

Does that mean I have to get the professional edition if I want to use the built in resource editor? That would be suck, cause I am not in school right now, but am only entering university in autumn - which means I could get the professional edition for free by then. Would suck to use a different resource editor in the meantime just to have to get used to another one once 6 months later...

Anyways, you know any good external Windows resource editors?

[modoran]

Why you dont just download professional or ultimate edition from Microsoft web site ? It is fully functional trial for 90 days.