Book Image

Mastering Visual Studio 2017

By : Kunal Chowdhury
Book Image

Mastering Visual Studio 2017

By: Kunal Chowdhury

Overview of this book

Visual Studio 2017 is the all-new IDE released by Microsoft for developers, targeting Microsoft and other platforms to build stunning Windows and web apps. Learning how to effectively use this technology can enhance your productivity while simplifying your most common tasks, allowing you more time to focus on your project. With this book, you will learn not only what VS2017 offers, but also what it takes to put it to work for your projects. Visual Studio 2017 is packed with improvements that increase productivity, and this book will get you started with the new features introduced in Visual Studio 2017 IDE and C# 7.0. Next, you will learn to use XAML tools to build classic WPF apps, and UWP tools to build apps targeting Windows 10. Later, you will learn about .NET Core and then explore NuGet, the package manager for the Microsoft development platform. Then, you will familiarize yourself with the debugging and live unit testing techniques that comes with the IDE. Finally, you'll adapt Microsoft's implementation of cloud computing with Azure, and the Visual Studio integration with Source Control repositories.
Table of Contents (11 chapters)

Designing UWP applications

Before going into designing UWP apps, you must know that the designer window allows you to preview your UI design in various devices and in various screen orientations without building and running the app. All these can be done within the Visual Studio designer view itself.

When you open your XAML page in designer view, you will see a panel that has a drop-down menu and a few buttons inside it, as shown in the following screenshot. The dropdown lists a few devices, starting from 5-inch phone devices to tablet, desktop, Xbox, Surface Hub, IoT device, and HoloLens, each having different device sizes and screen resolution:

The adjacent buttons of the dropdown are used to preview your UI in different screen orientations, portrait or landscape, followed by a label that displays your effective screen resolution.

At the end of the panel, there is a small wheel...