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

Understanding the core concepts of code generation

The concepts of source code generation, generative programming, and metaprogramming have been around for a very long time. The central concept is to develop programs that use input parameters, metadata, or both to output code themselves.

Input parameters are self-explanatory to programmers, and metadata will be covered in the next section. Because this is a hands-on book, we will not include much theory behind these techniques. Instead, for context, we will cursorily consider that the Visual Studio project and item templates are basically code generators themselves. Likewise, if you are familiar with T4 templates (usually denoted by the file extension .tt, and T4 stands for Text Template Transformation Toolkit), you know their entire purpose is to generate code. In fact, Visual Studio itself uses T4 templates behind the scenes to output code, as we will see shortly.

The important thing to understand here is that code generators...