Microsoft Visual Studio.NET is a professional development environment that is built on top of the .NET Framework. It provides an integrated development environment that is a single, unified, fully customizable environment shared across all Visual Studio.NET languages – both languages provided by Microsoft, namely C#, C++, Visual Basic VB and J# (see below) and third-party languages. Visual Studio.NET simplifies many development tasks and allows us to quickly create .NET applications based on Windows forms and web forms as well as consume services provided by the underlying operating system (see Figure 1.2).