Getting Started with Microsoft Visual Studio 2010 using C++

Folks:
We are getting ready to gear up for the Spring semester. This means a lot of students will be starting their first programming course or possibly their first C++ course. Many programming and C++ courses make use of Microsoft Visual Studio (MSVS). MSVS is an Integrated Development Environment (IDE) used to develop software. IDE's combine source code editors, compiler, linker and possibly many other tools such as debuggers, source code management, database management, etc.

Love it or hate it, MSVS is used by many programming shops and for students hoping to do software development for a career, I believe you would be well served to learn the basics of this vast set of tools.

I fully appreciate that a certain number of you simply hate Microsoft and all of their products. Also some of you might be keen on doing Mobile App development for iOS or Android. Others may only want to do development under Linux. Those are fine and there are IDE's such as Eclipse and Xcode that you can explore as well for those environments.

For now though, your professor or instructor may have indicated you should use MSVS and so now you are faced with the task of getting up to speed as quickly as possible.  Basically I think you need to learn enough about MSVS so that you can efficiently:

1. Write and edit source code
2. Run the Code -> Compile -> Debug cycle very quickly
3. Use a debugger to see where your code has problems
4. Document and format your assignments and projects
5. Back up and possibly share your projects

To this end I have written a tutorial to get you started with these basics. Please visit my web site: http://www.holowczak.com/tutorials.html and look for the section on Visual Studio Tutorials.
Please take a look and let me know what you think. I am adding new topics all of the time so please send in your suggestions.

Cheers,

Rich H.