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

Using the VSIX deployment package

In prior chapters, we had to take steps to manually install our custom project and item templates. Because we are using a VSIX extension installation project, we no longer need to manually import our template. Instead, simply running the CitySelector.Deploy project will make our template available for testing in Visual Studio's experimental instance.

If you are unfamiliar with using the experimental instance, it is basically a shadow copy of Visual Studio made automatically for you during installation. This copy is then used by developers to experiment with code in a way that does not affect your main instance. If anything gets corrupted, simply run the Reset the Visual Studio 2019 Experimental Instance app and a new, fresh, shadow copy is made.

As you will see in a moment, debugging launches a second—separate—instance of Visual Studio. This action is controlled by specifying a command-line argument of /rootsuffix Exp...