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 extensions

So, what do you do when you want an extension but you can't find one in the marketplace that does what you want? Or, what if you find one but it doesn't do exactly what you want? It's simple—we're DEVELOPERS! We can just write our own.

Creating extensions in Visual Studio 2019 for Windows

To develop extensions in Windows, we need the Visual Studio SDK (VSSDK). This can be installed using the Visual Studio extension development workload in the Visual Studio Installer, as shown in the following screenshot:

Figure 11.5 – VSSDK installation

There are a number of things we can extend in Visual Studio, including menus and commands, tool windows, languages and editors, projects, Visual Studio itself, and many other things. The VSSDK provides templates for menu commands, tool windows, editor extensions, basic VSPackages, and Visual Studio Extension (VSIX) projects.

Let's create a simple menu command...