Book Image

Visual Studio 2019 Tricks and Techniques

By : Paul Schroeder, Aaron Cure
Book Image

Visual Studio 2019 Tricks and Techniques

By: Paul Schroeder, Aaron Cure

Overview of this book

Visual Studio 2019 (VS 2019) and Visual Studio Code (VS Code) are powerful professional development tools that help you to develop applications for any platform with ease. Whether you want to create web, mobile, or desktop applications, Microsoft Visual Studio is your one-stop solution. This book demonstrates some of the most sophisticated capabilities of the tooling and shows you how to use the integrated development environment (IDE) more efficiently to be more productive. You’ll begin by gradually building on concepts, starting with the basics. The introductory chapters cover shortcuts, snippets, and numerous optimization tricks, along with debugging techniques, source control integration, and other important IDE features that will help you make your time more productive. With that groundwork in place, more advanced concepts such as the inner workings of project and item templates are covered. You will also learn how to write quality, secure code more efficiently as well as discover how certain Visual Studio features work 'under the hood'. By the end of this Visual Studio book, you’ll have learned how to write more secure code faster than ever using your knowledge of the extensions and processes that make developing successful solutions more enjoyable and repeatable.
Table of Contents (21 chapters)
1
Section 1: Visual Studio IDE Productivity Essentials
9
Section 2: Customizing Project Templates and Beyond
13
Section 3: Leveraging Extensions for the Win

Understanding item templates

The easiest way to understand project items is to simply open any solution in Visual Studio and either use the Ctrl + Shift + A keyboard shortcut or right-click in Solution Explorer and choose Add | New Item… from the context menu. When you do this, a dialog containing a variety of project item templates ready to add to your project will appear. The following screenshot shows some item templates that come installed by default with the .NET desktop development workload such as Class, Interface, User Control (WPF), Resource Dictionary (WPF), and Application Configuration File:

Figure 8.2 – Project item templates

Other project types, such as a web project, will have different item types including Razor Component, API Controller, and Content Page. As you will soon see, we are not limited to just what comes out of the box. Visual Studio provides excellent support for creating your own templates. This can be a great way...