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

Creating the VSIX deployment package

Visual Studio extensions are installed using code packages that are commonly referred to as VSIX files, due to their file extension. Some extensions install user interface (UI) controls or add entirely new functionality to the integrated development environment (IDE), as we will see in later chapters. In this chapter, however, we will show the pieces required to make a deployment package that contains a project template capable of reproducing the custom solution from the prior section, using the Add Project dialog in Visual Studio.

Because creating a multi-project template could be a small book unto itself, a pre-built multi-project template is provided in the sample code. Our focus here will be what it takes to generate the VSIX file that can be broadly distributed to other Visual Studio users. As such, we start at a point after both the Web API and WPF projects are exported as templates. This project export technique was demonstrated in the...