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

Introducing the client-server project

You are already familiar with the common single-project templates that Visual Studio ships with and makes available in the Add New Project dialog. But did you know that it is possible to have multiple coordinated projects in a single template? This multi-project template capability is what we work with in this chapter.

We are going to take a sample client-server application that consists of two related projects and use it as the basis for our multi-project template. So, the goal here is to develop a custom client-server project template that, when invoked from Visual Studio's New Project dialog, creates not one but two related projects, as follows:

  • The first (client-side) project is basically the CitySelector Windows Presentation Foundation (WPF) application that we are already familiar with from prior chapters.
  • The second (server-side) project is a Web API project designed to provide data to the WPF application.

Of course...