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

Code Snippets Manager dialog

The Code Snippets Manager dialog is another way to view and manage the snippets that are available to you. To open the Code Snippets Manager window and browse through the available snippets, use the Ctrl + K + Ctrl + B shortcut or navigate through Tools | Code Snippets Manager. Choose a language from the drop-down menu at the top. I'm selecting CSharp in the screenshot shown here and expanding the Visual C# folder:

Figure 5.8 – Code Snippets Manager

Highlight a snippet to see its properties. In the preceding screenshot, an #if preprocessor directive is selected. Its properties tell us that this snippet can be invoked using the shortcut #if. It is also a SurroundsWith snippet, meaning the user can highlight existing code and the snippet definition includes content to insert both before and after the highlighted selection. In this case, an #if would be inserted before and an #endif inserted after.

What are preprocessor...