Paul Schroeder - Visual Studio 2019 Tricks and Techniques: A developers guide to writing better code and maximizing productivity

A developer's guide to writing better code and maximizing productivity

Paul Schroeder

Aaron Cure

BIRMINGHAMMUMBAI

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To my mother, Karen, and to the memory of my father, Robert, for creating the company that set our family on this path decades ago. To the memory of my brother, Michael, whose son, Robert, now connects a third generation of Schroeders to that very company.

Paul Schroeder

To my loving family, Sherry, Katy, Kenzie, and Tee, for all their support and patience in all the craziness that is our life. Also, to my parents, Charles and Karen, who raised us to believe that through hard work and dedication, anything is possible, and for moving us out of a place that thought that computers were "a passing fad."

Aaron Cure

Packt.com

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By combining Visual Studio Code and Visual Studio (VS), the brand is over two times more commonly used by developers than any other environment (Stack Overflow, 2019). What that means is that this topic is vital for 80% of all developers.

It also means that with this book, Paul Schroeder and Aaron Cure had the opportunity to provide something incredibly valuable and essential for developers, a vital reference for the global developer community.

I personally think there are two ways to learn in life: you can learn from your own failures and mistakes, or you can learn from someone else's failures and mistakes. I'll pick the second option, every time.

With this book, Paul and Aaron have cracked the code. Everything in here is a lesson learned. It's like you're getting all the advice that was learned from the mistakes and failures of thousands of developers... including (1) the developers who Paul and Aaron learned from (via books, articles, and advice), (2) the developers at Microsoft, who got feedback from customers and built the great features you'll find in VS (not to mention the customers who struggled and needed those features), (3) the developers in the community who helped create some of the amazing extensions covered in this book, and (4) the personal insights discovered directly by Paul and Aaron, through their combined experience of 40+ years in software development!

You now have a book (in your hands or on a screen) that not only teaches beginners how to use VS but is also useful for intermediate developers pursuing knowledge to become more effective. Simply put, this could very well be one of the greatest investments you make for your career. Even if you are a very experienced developer, you'll still gain a lot from this book... you'll learn a few new techniques and, more importantly, you'll have a cheat sheet to look back on as a reference.

New developers will rapidly learn about the different types of VS, the shortcuts, how to use the interface, how to use a repo, exploring data, and compiling/debugging. Meanwhile, experienced developers will pick up a few new tricks in those topics, and they will also learn (and have as a reference to come back to) how to better leverage code snippets, how to become a legend with templates, and how to take full advantage of extensions.

If you apply the snippets, templates, and extension practices found in this book, not only will you become a drastically more efficient and effective coder, but you'll also become your team's hero and thought leader!

What does all this mean? It means that if you're a developer, you owe it to yourself to learn from as many failures as you can. This book is born out of the mistakes and failures of thousands of developers who came before you. You would be wise to read it now and revisit it each year. If you do that, you'll get faster and better, every time.

Ed Price Senior Program Manager (of Architectural Publishing)Microsoft | Azure Architecture Center (http://aka.ms/Architecture)Co-author of four books, including Hands-On Microservices with C# 8 and .NET Core 3 (from Packt)

Paul Schroeder is a versatile application developer, speaker, author, and managing director at MSC Technology Consulting (MSCTek.com). Along with a multi-decade professional IT career, Paul has a bachelor's degree in computer science and an MBA, and has earned an MCSD certification for web development.

Whether coding or not, Paul enjoys spending time with his marvelous and talented wife, Robin, herself a Xamarin developer/speaker who creates Bluetooth mesh mobile applications.