Bruce Johnson - Essential Visual Studio 2019: Boosting Development Productivity with Containers, Git, and Azure Tools

Any source code or other supplementary material referenced by the author in this book is available to readers on GitHub via the books product page, located at www.apress.com/9781484257180 . For more detailed information, please visit http://www.apress.com/source-code .

Visual Studio is an integral part of the daily life of millions of developers around the world. And, even as it approaches the age of 20 years old, it hasnt stopped innovating ways to make developers work life more productive. This is a laudable achievement and is one of the reasons for Visual Studios success.

The challenge, however, is keeping up with the innovations. With each new edition, there are changes made to the user interface, new features that get added, and existing functionality that is improved. And the cadence of the editions has been every 2 years. Knowing what these modifications are and when they can be used is critical to taking full advantage of the power of Visual Studio. The goal of this book is to bring the developer up to speed on Visual Studio 2019. It will not be focused just on functionality added in Visual Studio 2019, but on taking a deep dive into the areas where Visual Studio 2019 made changes. That way, even if youre coming from much earlier versions of Visual Studio, you can see where and when upgrading to Visual Studio 2019 could make you more productive.

Essential Visual Studio 2019 is targeted at developers who are not new to Visual Studio. It doesnt cover the basics of creating projects, editing files, and debugging your applications. Instead, the focus is on the features that you might not be familiar with. This includes not just those capabilities added with Visual Studio 2019, but also talks about the areas that have been the focus of the Microsoft development team over the last couple of years.

This is not to say that developers new to Visual Studio cant benefit from the book. The depth of coverage is more than you will find in many larger books. And the relentless focus is on features that are used. The content goes deeper than how to create a Hello World project. It touches on areas that real-world developers will find useful every day.

To use this book effectively, youll need only one additional item Microsoft Visual Studio 2019 Professional Edition. While there are a couple of features that are available only with the Visual Studio 2019 Enterprise Edition (and this limitation is mentioned when it comes up), the vast majority of the book deals with the Professional version. And in fact, a majority of the book content equally applies to the Community edition also.

While there are some coding samples in the book, they are not particularly extensive or complicated. The samples are only used to illustrate the Visual Studio features being discussed. But as a result, this book assumes that you have some familiarity with C#.

This book is divided into ten chapters, each focusing on a different aspect of Visual Studio 2019.

Installation and IDE Differences With every version of Visual Studio, there are some minor changes to the user experience. This chapter covers the installation process, options, and limitations. As well, it describes the fundamental changes and additions to the IDE itself.

Assisted Coding Writing code is a relatively crucial function when it comes to Visual Studio. Part of the productivity promise is to help you write code, find code, and navigate through code. This chapter looks at the features Visual Studio offers to help you do all of these things, including coverage of both CodeLens and Code Cleanup.

Unit Testing The modern flow for software development is red/green/refactor. To support the developer, Visual Studio provides both a framework and functionality to enable the red/green portion of that process. And in some cases, Visual Studio can help you generate tests automatically.

Refactoring Code To complete that trifecta of development flow, Visual Studio 2019 provides a decent number of refactoring actions. This chapter describes the different refactoring options that Visual Studio exposes.

Using Git in Visual Studio 2019 - Git has become the source control of choice for most developers. In this chapter, the support that is provided by Visual Studio 2019 for using Git and some of its most frequently used concepts are covered.

Collaboration One of the up and coming ideas for developing is collaboration. And in a world of distributed development, collaboration across the Internet is an interesting one. This chapter looks at the different ways that Visual Studio supports distributed coding, including how you can use Live Share to perform distributed pair programming and debugging.

Debugging and Profiling Bugs are an inevitable part of software development. A good IDE finds different ways to support a developers efforts to identify and correct problems. This chapter looks at the different ways that Visual Studio 2019 helps, including data breakpoints and time travel debugging.