Home and Learn: VB Net Course
Getting Started with Visual Basic .NET
Starting up Visual Studio Community
In a previous lesson, you installed Visual Studio and created a new project. If you haven't installed it, you should do so now.
When you create a new project, you'll see a screen similar to this, if you're using Visual Studio 2026:
Visual Studio 2022 users won't have the new flayout panel on the right. The right-hand side of your software will be like this:
For 2026 users, the CoPilot Chat tabe will be displayed, at first, But notice there are three tabs at the bottom: GitHub CoPilot Chat, Solution Explorer, and Git Changes. Click the Solution Explorer tab:
If the floating flyout is annoying, you can dock it. Hold your left mouse button down at the top of the flyout, just to the right of the Solution Explorer text will do. Now drag the flyout around. You should see a docking guide diamond, as Micosoft have called it:
Move your cursor over the right arrow of the guide diamond. A shaded area (usually green or purple) will appear, indicating where the window will be placed. Release the mouse button while the shaded area is covering the right side of the screen.
The window will now be docked to the right and will no longer float over your code. If you need to adjust its size or position, you can drag the edges of the docked window. You can also right-click the title bar of the window to access additional docking and layout options.
Not to change from Dark Mode, if you don't like it.
From the menus at the top of Visual Studio, click on Tools. From the Tools menu, select Options. When you see the Options screen appear, click on the Environment tab on the left:
From the Color theme menu, select a color for your Integrated Development Environment (IDE). We went for Light but there are quite a few more to choose from:
In the next lesson below, we'll explore the Visual Studio IDE some more, especially the VB form.
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