Visual Studio 2019: Unveiling The Hidden Gems That Boost Developer’s Productivity
Every year, Microsoft brings significant improvements and adds new features to its powerful IDE- Visual Studio to make it a best-in-class tool for the developers, enterprises, and community forums. In the same series, in 2019, Visual Studio has gained a couple of enhancements and new additions that are aimed at improving developer’s productivity and team collaboration. However, the incremental advancements in the Visual Studio are not groundbreaking but projected to make the development-testing-debugging-deployment cycle seamless.
The updates of the productive version get installed on the developer’s machine when it’s idle so that the valuable time and efforts of the developers can be saved.
Have you missed a day-long launch event for Visual Studio 2019? Don’t get upset. Our coding superheroes who have attended the event have got your needs covered by penning down everything that helps you stay productive. Championing the new features brought great advantage to the developers looking to progress in the programming space.
Here’s what’s new in Visual Studio 2019 which lets developers personalize the Visual Studio and code efficiently:
Start page and create project page gets redesigned
In the new look of the start page, the developers can directly clone a repository, create a new project, open the existing project, and open the folder for code changes. The design of the ‘create a project’ window is also changed without any subtle changes to its functionality.
Live share
For enhancing the developers’ collaboration on projects, the new live share option allows the developers to share, edit, and debug the codes across every screen in real-time. It proves to be useful for conducting code reviews or pair programming.
IntelliCode
The extension is yet optional-to-use for the developers. It’s packed with AI-assisted capabilities that complete the lines of code for the developers, but available just for C# and XAML.
Better search
The search feature is armed with new capabilities where the developers can search for everything, be it menus, commands, project code, options, or installable components.
One-click code cleanup
The new option will appear when the developers will open the file that illustrates the file’s health. It includes a summary of errors, warnings, and suggestions to improve the code accuracy. The code clean-up rules can be run and configured to best suit the custom development needs.
Debugger improvements
The complex objects have a deeper hierarchy more than the three levels that search option provides while code debugging. In the latest version, it’s made possible by facilitating the search depth limit.
The plenty of additions are interesting, but using them tactically takes productivity to a new level.
Also Read: .Net For Web API — Everything You Need To Know
Take a glance at the myriad of tips and tricks to lets developers easily write, navigate, and debug the code:
Code writing
The developers can write hundreds of lines of code quickly by using convenience commands that accomplish the editing task at speed; using IntelliSense code editor that instantly reflect the fuzzy matching of text; using built-in snippets; using quick actions that fix the code errors with a single action; showing and editing the definition of code element quickly.
Navigation
The developers can move around or find the code at speed leveraging several techniques that are- bookmark the particular lines of code in a file; ability to search for symbol definitions in a file; browse the code structure; facility of searching the contents of tool window; use the search box to find out any item you are looking for.
Debugging
The unavoidable step of software development eats up a lot of time that can be turned into time savvy process by following a few tips- by testing the same application or functionality in different browsers with easy switch to installed web browsers; creating temporary breakpoints in the current lines of code by hitting F5 that break the task as the code is executed; using conditional debugging to debug a section of code or specify the item from where we want the breakpoint to be active; thread switching during debugging can be avoided by locking debug process for a single thread; the immediate window can be used to debug the expressions or check the results of the variable values during debugging.
Additional shortcuts
The shortcuts allow the developers to work more in less time as remembering a couple of key combinations cut down the multiple steps involved in performing a particular task. For instance, the key combination- CTRL+SHIFT+A take the developers to the lastly added file, or CTRL+K allows the developers to format the code based on pre-defined rules.
When the developers want to refactor the code by extracting some part of the code into a new method, then CTRL+ R, M alleviate the need to write a new method manually, and automatically create and call a new method. Besides, the new interface from the existing class can be extracted using CTRL+R, I combination.
While working on file content, the copy-and-paste of lines of code can be done with a single key combination- CTRL+X; when the developers want to execute the same action on multiple lines, then instead of repeating the same process line by line, it’s better to use CTRL+ALT+click combination and then same task can be performed on multiple lines at the same time. These features improve the speed when developers work on the file content.
Takeaway
Over a decade old IDE- the Visual Studio is an extensible and productive tool for the .net development company that has got a bunch of new updates, shortcut commands, and features that increase the speed of coding and make the lives of the developers easier. Everything from new additions and improvements to tips and tricks to use the Visual Studio 2019 is described in the article. What’s more? Learn, transform, and succeed in your niche leveraging the valuable information. All the best!
