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

Traversing your solution

As the size and complexity of your code base grow, knowing strategies for getting to the code or tool window you need becomes essential. Extra time and energy spent simply finding the file or method that needs attention can detract from your overall effectiveness. In this section, we will cover a few of the lesser-known quick access tricks.

Navigating through active windows or tabs

In the last chapter, we showed how the search box (Ctrl + T) can be used to quickly locate files of interest. Another handy approach to quickly jump around is to cycle through the list of open windows and/or files. In this exercise, we will use more keyboard shortcuts to navigate through the active windows and open file tabs:

Figure 3.7 – Cycling active windows

To cycle through active windows in Visual Studio 2019 for Windows, use the following steps:

  1. Press Alt + F7 to bring up a navigation window (keep Alt pressed):

    Figure 3.8 –...