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

VS Code in the Visual Studio Marketplace

Unlike Visual Studio 2019, VS Code always shows extensions from the Visual Studio Marketplace. Searching for extensions is much like using the Online window or Gallery tab in Visual Studio 2019. Type your search criteria in the search box, select an extension to view the details, and if you like it click Install.

Creating an extension

What happens when you search and search but you still can't find the extension you want? Well, we are developers, after all, so let's just write our own! Everything we need to create an extension is available in a couple of npm packages all ready for us.

Generating a basic extension

Let's create an extension that inserts a licensing header at the top of an open document, as follows:

  1. To get started, we will need to install the yo and generator_code npm packages. The yo package is a code scaffolder, which creates a basic project for us. The generator_code package contains the templates...