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

Investigating advanced debugging

Becoming a skilled debugger can be the difference between fixing a bug in 5 minutes or 5 hours. Knowing how to step through code, inspect it at various points, and find that little copy and paste error you (or someone else!) injected is critical to being successful. Let's discuss a few strategies that you can use to be more successful.

Breakpoints

One of the most useful things you can use while debugging is a breakpoint.

To set a breakpoint, click on a line of code and hit F9 (or click in the margin to the left of the line number), and a red dot will appear. When the debugger reaches this line, it will stop and wait for your next command. Notice the breakpoint on line 14 in the following screenshot:

Figure 7.11 – The VS Code breakpoint

An advanced version of this technique is the conditional breakpoint. Set a breakpoint, right-click on it, and then click on Conditions (in Visual Studio Code and Visual Studio...