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

Choosing useful Visual Studio 2019 for Mac extensions

Unlike VS Code and Visual Studio 2019 for Windows, Visual Studio 2019 for Mac is a newer offering and hasn't really had time to build the following that the other two flavors have. As such, the number of extensions available pale in comparison. That isn't to say that there aren't any available, and there are a number of them that you should definitely install, but they tend to fill a very specific purpose. Here are a few of our favorites.

LiveXAML for Xamarin.Forms

Developing Xamarin apps and constantly editing, pushing to the emulator, loading the app, looking at the rendered output, stopping the app, changing the XAML, and repeating the process can get very tedious quickly. LiveXAML activates when you start the debugger and automatically updates the view in the app as you make changes to the XAML in Visual Studio:

Figure 16.13 – Editing XAML with live results in the debugger

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