Visual Studio 2019 Features

Introduction

In this blog, I am going to explain the new features of Visual Studio 2019 and how these features can make us more productive.

What is IDE?

IDE stands for Integrated Development Environment. This Visual Studio tool will help you with software development. It will help to be very productive in your development work. Visual Studio is an incredible editor with advanced code editor features that help you to create software in any language i.e. C++, C#, .NET, Python, JavaScript, R, J, and TypeScript, and many more languages and It has Visual Studio has advanced debugging and diagnostics features.

Visual Studio is used for local and remote debugging of any type of code i.e. JavaScript, multi-threaded code and used for software testing purposes. You can write and execute unit tests, integration tests, performance tests, stress, and load tests.

This tool will help to collaborate with version control systems, like Azure DevOps Repos, GitHub TFS.

There are many extensions are available in the marketplace to download and use. Also, you can write and publish your own.

Download Visual Studio 2019

You can download Visual Studio here.

You will find the latest version of Visual Studio. For me, on today's date, it is showing the latest version Visual Studio 2019

Visual Studio Editions

Figure 1 – Visual Studio 2019- Download

There are different versions of the product, Community, Professional, and Enterprise.

The Community edition is free for students, open-source contributors, and individuals
The Professional is suited to small teams
The Enterprise is a scalable, end-to-end solution for teams of any size.

You can compare the products here.

Visual Studio Features

There are some Visual Studio features that can increase your productivity, covered below.

Export and Share Installation Settings

This feature will help make sure that your new installation of Visual Studio 2019 has the same features as your previous version. For the importing and exporting setting please click on Visual Studio Installer. In that, you can see all the Visual Studio installed versions. In my case, I have only Visual Studio 2019. (for reference please see Figure 2 – Visual Studio 2019- Installer) After exporting, you can save them as a file, and share that setting file with your team as well. When you share this with your team please make sure that everyone has the same workloads installed.

Figure 2 – Visual Studio 2019- Installer

The new Search

While working with Visual Studio, I found that this is a very interesting part. In previous versions of Visual Studio, for search, we have the quick launch bar but in the new Visual Studio 2019, the quick launch bar has been replaced by an all-new search bar.

In Visual Studio the search is now a fuzzy search, so you don’t have to be precise in your search. It’s much more act like modern search engines. It is a very fast and smart search also you can do anything from search now. This search is context-sensitive so you will get a result based on the context.

You can use Shortcut key CTRL+Q.

Figure 3 – Visual Studio 2019- Search

Code clean-up (one-click code cleanup)

Code cleanup is another new feature of Visual Studio in that you can quickly see the health status of a document. This is mostly used to identify and then fix both warnings and suggestions with one click of a button.

Figure 4 – Visual Studio 2019- Code cleanup

In Figure 4, you can see that the red squiggles are errors and the green squiggles that are warnings. The errors are clear. The warnings tell that the variable var is declared but never used. You can easily fix the warnings with one-click code cleanup. For code cleanup, the keyboard shortcut is Ctrl+K, Ctrl+E.

Figure 5 – Visual Studio 2019- Configure Code cleanup.

You can configure code cleanup profiles with some target specific cleanup rules after that you can use them with one click. This profile available some rules like Applying implicit or explicit type references, sorting usings, remove unnecessary usings and there are many more that you can add or remove depends upon your need. For a reference, please check Figure 5 – Visual Studio 2019 - Configure Code cleanup.

Figure 6 – Visual Studio 2019- Code Style

You can configure the behavior in the Code Style settings and those settings you can export by click on the “Generate .editorconfig file from setting“ button. These exported files you can share with your team. For opening code styles, click on Tools and then Options, or just type “Code Style“ in search. For a reference, please check Figure 6 – Visual Studio 2019- Code Style.png

Visual Studio Live Share

Figure 7 – Visual Studio 2019- Live Share

This is the most interesting feature, where you can collaboratively edit and debug code with other developers in real-time. You can instantly and securely share your project with others and also you can debug the code. It doesn’t matter if the other person is using Visual Studio or Visual Studio Code, and it also doesn’t matter which operating system is they are using. You can also debug your application together. There’s also a live audio feature that connects you by voice so that you can talk to each other.

Figure 8 – Visual Studio 2019- Live Share URL

As a developer, you are constantly working on your machine. Sometimes you need help to solve the problem or you need an opinion or maybe get the review of the code before that code going to production. In this case with the help of Live Share, you can share your code instantly without having to download your own copy.

Figure 9 – Visual Studio 2019- Live Share code

Figure 10 – Visual Studio 2019- Live Share demo

Use the following steps to perform live share:

Click on Live Share (please refer to Figure 7 – Visual Studio 2019- Live Share)
Click on copy invitation link (please refer Figure 8 – Visual Studio 2019- Live Share URL)
For the demo, I've opened Visual Studio code on the same machine. (please refer to Figure 9 – Visual Studio 2019- Live Share code)
If the Live Share extension is not available, please install this extension.
In Visual Studio code please click on live share extension and pest copped URL in “join collaborative session”.
Now live sharing will start. For the demo, I have opened both Visual Studio on the same machine (please refer to Figure 10 – Visual Studio 2019- Live Share demo).

IntelliCode

For more information, please visit here.

The developer assistant that’s based on AI. It provides assisted IntelliSense. Instead of giving you code completion suggestions that are just in alphabetical order, it puts what you’re most likely to use first. To get most likely by learning from thousands of open source projects and by learning from your own code because that’s the only place it can learn about the classes that you have written. IntelliCode gives suggestions based on this context. For reference please check figure 11 – Visual Studio 2019- Intellicode

Figure 11 – Visual Studio 2019- Intellicode