Video: Visual Studio 2017 Features

Visual Studio 2017 got lots of new features and so that I’ve created a new video for demonstrating all the features of video. Please have a look at that video at below.



Let me know what kind of video you want to watch more!. Stay tuned for more!

Continue Reading

Code Navigation features in Visual Studio Code

Visual Studio Code is an open source, free, Cross-platform editor and I have been using it now more than the year. I just simply loved this editor. It’s a got lot of feature and there are some cool navigation features there. In this blog post, we are going to explore those navigation features.

Quick Open File Navigation Features(Ctrl+Tab):

If you press Ctrl + Tab then it will show all the open files in Visual Studio Code.

Go To Definition(F12):

If Language is supported in Visual Studio Code then you have that feature available just like have it in full Visual Studio IDE.  You can press F12 to go to definition and the same way you can also right click and select Go To Definition.

Peek Definition(Alt + F12):

Peek Definition is working same as Go To Definition the only difference is it will load a windows inline and show. It is quite useful when you want to quickly see something. You can use this feature via pressing Alt+F12.

Open Symbol(Ctrl+T):

It also contains some Resharper like features you can go to any symbol via pressing Ctrl + T. Just type the first letter of a type you want to navigate to, regardless of which file.

Go To File(Ctrl + P):

You can also go to any file with Go To File feature of Visual Studio code via pressing Ctrl + P.   This quite useful when you have large code base.




There tons of other features available with Visual Studio code. So if you have not tried this editor I would highly recommend to try it. I’m sure you fall love in it. You can download Visual Studio code from the following location.

https://code.visualstudio.com/

Stay tuned for more!.

Continue Reading

Code Navigation features in Visual Studio 2017

This blog post is a part of Visual Studio 2017 New feature Series

TL;DR:

With Visual Studio 2017 there are lots of new Code Navigation features introduced. We are going to look all the options available in Visual Studio 2017.

Navigation your code with Visual studio 2017:

Visual Studio 2017 have newly refreshed code navigation features which help you moving from point A to B easily and fewer distractions. There are mainly four new features available.

Go to Implementation(Ctrl+F12):

It helps you navigate from any base type to implementation of the concrete type.

Go To Line(Ctrl+G):

It helps moves cursor from current line to specified line number.

Go To All(Ctrl+T):

It helps you navigate directly to any file/type/symbol/member. You can move from any files to anywhere with this feature easily.

Go To File(Ctrl+ 1, Ctrl + F):

You can easily navigate between files with this feature.

Go To Type(Ctrl+1, Ctrl + F):

You can move to any type with this feature. It searches classes/interfaces/enums and delegates and moves your current cursor selected type.

Go To Member(Ctrl+ 1, Ctrl + M):

You can move between members for a particular class. It searches Global Variables and Global Functions, Class Member variables and member functions, Constants, Enum items, Properties, and events.

Go to Symbol(Ctrl + 1, Ctrl + S):

You can move to any symbols, search result includes Go to Type and Go to Member.

Find All References(Shift + F12):

In the earlier version of Visual Studio Find All References was the plain list without any syntax highlighting and coloring. Now with Visual Studio 2017 it has got coloring and splits all the information into their respective columns. This column can be also customized so you will only see what you want to see in Find All References Window.



So Visual Studio 2017 now got lots of features and that will make code navigation very easy. It will definitely increase developer productivity and made life easy.

Continue Reading

A new start page for Visual Studio 2017

This blog post is a part of Visual Studio 2017 New feature Series

Recently Microsoft has released a new version of Visual Studio 2017 and as usual, there are tons of features available with Visual Studio 2017. Visual Studio has always been one of my favorite IDE. We are going to look into all the features one by one. The first thing when you launch a New instance of the Visual studio will launch a start page. So in this blog post, we are going to explore what’s new in start page of Visual Studio 2017.

A new start page for visual studio 2017

The first thing once you load visual studio 2017 will have a start page. It has been divided into three columns. The first column contains Get Started and Recent sections. The second column contains Open Project and New Project section and the third column contains Developer new section. By default when you load Visual Studio it looks like following.

Get Started and Recent Section of Start Page:

Get Started section of Visual Studio 2017 contains how you can get started with Visual Studio. It contains a variety of links including how to get started with Visual studio to how to extend visual studio.



The recent section contains recently open projects. It is divided into two part Today and Last week. Today section contains the link to the project that is opened today in Visual Studio.  Last week section contains projects that are used during last week.

Open and New Project Section:

The open section contains four things.

1. A link to connect Visual Studio team services from where you can directly connect to a team services project and open it from there.
2. Open Project/Solution: - Open project or solution works in same as the earlier version of Visual Studio. It open project or solution available on your computer.
3. Open Folder: - It will open a folder available on your computer and then display all the code files available in that particular folder.
4. Open Web Site: This works same as earlier of Visual Studio. It opens an ASP.NET Web Sites available on your local computer.

New Project is brand new in Visual Studio 2017. By default, it shows the recent project's templates you recently used and also there is search box to search the templates available in Visual studio 2017.


Even you search templates via putting some text in the search box like following.


So now to create a new solution or project you don’t have go to file menu. You can directly create a new project from start page itself.

Developer News Section:

This developer new section contains new feeds from various sites.

Customize Start page in Visual Studio 2017:

Like earlier edition of Visual Studio, you can also customize the start page of Visual Studio 2017. There is an option available for the same under Tools-> Options menu. Select environment and Goto Startup following dialog will come.




Here you configure options like At startup what should be shown. You can also setup time to download the content of developer news. Also, you can also use customize start page.

That’s it. Hope you like it. Stay tuned for more!!.

Continue Reading

ASP.NET Core Application continuous integration with visual studio.com and git

Previously I have written couple posts for continuous integration series and this post is also part of it. Recently Microsoft has released ASP.NET Core 1.0. So in this post, we are going to see how we can do the continuous integration for ASP.NET Core application. I am going to use visualstudio.com as our source control repository and git as our version controlling system. So Let’s get started.

The first thing we need to is to create a Project into VisualStudio.com like following.



Once you click on create the project it will create a project with GIT as version controlling system.



Now our project is ready. Once you click on navigate to project it will load project dashboard like below.



Now go-to “Build & Release” section of the project. It will load the page like below.



Now to enable continuous integration for this project we need to create a new build definition for that click on Plus green icon on left side. It will load a wizard to create a build definition. The first screen presented with default templates like below.



We are going to select ASP.NET Core build which there in preview mode and click next will load source control step like below.



Her we are using visualstudio.com so we are not going to change anything but we are going select continuous integration check like below to enable continuous integration like below.



Click on create will create build definition like below.



Click on save button to save build definition. It will open up a dialog like below.



Click on ok will save build definition.  Now we are done with the configuration of continuous integration and now its time to add code to check whether this configuration is working or not. To add code click on the code menu on visualstudio.com it will load the following screen.



Now to configure the repository in visual studio we need to click on the clone in visual studio. It will open Visual Studio IDE.



Clicking on clone will clone repository in local and then we need to create an asp.net core application for that repository.



Clicking on open will create an asp.net core web application. Once you are done with creating the application, we need to push our code to master branch so that we can see whether our continuous integration is working or not. To push the changes, Goto team explorer it will load screen like below.



Click on changes will show the changes that are made for git repository like below. Put commit message and click on commit all.



It will commit changes local like below.



Now click on sync. It will load Synchronization screen like below.



Now click on push button to the push committed changes to the remote git repository.



It will push changes to the master branch. Now to check continuous integration go to build definition section of visualstudio.com. A build should be queued up for the changes we have made like below.



After some time if your commit changes are fine it will complete the build.



So you can see that our continuous integration is working fine. It’s pretty easy to setup. Hope you like it. Stay tuned for more.

Continue Reading

Some of the important shortcuts for Visual Studio Code

Visual studio code is a Great editor for the web development. I have started using it and I’m loving it more and more. For any editor shortcut keys are important you can do lots more without moving to mouse with a shortcut. In this blog post, we are going to learn about shortcuts for Visual Studio Code.

Ctrl + P:  Goto File, You can move to any file of open solution/folder in Visual Studio code.
Ctrl + Shift + O : Goto Symbol, You can move to any function, variable or symbol of the current file.
F12 : Goto Definition – You can move to the definition of symbol or function with this command
Ctrl + G : Goto line, You can move to particular line number
Alt + Left: Navigate  between files goes to the left side of files
Alt+ Right: Navigate between files goes to the right side of files
Alt + F12: Peek definition, You can see preview of code for a function
Ctrl + Shift + D: Debug folder or file.
Ctrl + Shift + F: Search in all files.
Ctrl + Shift + H: Replace in all the files
Ctrl + T: Go to symbol in all files
Ctrl + B : Toggle Slider Bar
Ctrl + 1: Focus Left Editor
Ctrl+ 2: Focus Right Editor
F2: Rename symbol and function
Ctrl + Shift + X : Goto Extension Window
Ctrl + J: Toggle Panels
Ctrl + ` : Open terminal in VSCode
Ctrl + Shift + U: Show output Window
Ctrl + Shift + M : Show problems, Where you can see all the problems related to code and warnings.

You can find all the shortcuts of Visual Studio code from the following link.
https://code.visualstudio.com/docs/customization/keybindings

That’s it. Hope you like it. Stay tuned for more!!

Continue Reading

Opening ASP.NET Core Visual studio solution in Visual Studio code

In this blog post, We are going to see how we can open an ASP.NET Core solution in visual studio code.  So what we are waiting for. First, we are going to create an ASP.NET Core web application like below.



Then select web application like below.



Now once you created Ok it will create an ASP.NET Core Web Application like below.



Now let’s run that application to make sure that its work fine.

Open ASP.NET Core Solution in Visual Studio Code:

For those who don’t know What is Visual Studio code is here is the definition from the Wikipedia.

Visual Studio Code is a source code editor developed by Microsoft for Windows, Linux and macOS. It includes support for debugging, embedded Git control, syntax highlighting, intelligent code completion, snippets, and code refactoring

It is a cross-platform open source editor for writing code from Microsoft. You can find more information about that from the following links.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Visual_Studio_Code
https://code.visualstudio.com/

Now we are going to see how we can open the same application with Visual Studio code. But before doing that we need to make sure that the computer have .NET Core installed on your machine and Also make sure that Visual Studio Code C# support is there in Visual Studio code. You can find more about that from the following link.

https://code.visualstudio.com/Docs/languages/csharp
https://code.visualstudio.com/docs/runtimes/dotnet

Since Visual Studio Code is not a full fledge IDE(Integrated Development Environment) like Visual Studio. We need to open the folder which contains the solution and source code. You can do that from Visual Studio Code.



Then select the src folder of your application like below.



Once you click on “Select Folder” it will open source code like below.




Now when you open any CSharp file on the right bottom you will see a text like installing OmniSharp.  OmniSharp is a set of tooling and editor integrations and Libraries that together creates great IntelliSense and  other tooling support for popular editors like Code, Sublime Text, Brackets, Atom,Emacs and Vim etc. You can find more information about that on the following link.

http://www.omnisharp.net/

Once you click on that text you can also see the progress of installation of Omnisharp libraries in output windows like below.



Once it installed it will automatically select the project which you have in solution. If you have multiple projects then you can click on that and it will ask you to select the project for which you need all IntelliSense .



That’s it. Now you have most of the experience that you got in Full Visual Studio and full fledge IntelliSense to all the .NET Features.



Disclaimer: I have tested it on the windows machine and its works perfectly fine. For macOS and Linux I would expect the same. For further information, you can follow a GitHub Issue which is already created by the community. You can find that GitHub issue at the following link.

https://github.com/OmniSharp/omnisharp-vscode/issues/283

That’s it. It’s very easy to use light weight Visual Studio Code for same development experience like Full Fledge Visual Studio.

Continue Reading

Publishing existing applications to Github with Visual Studio 2015

Before some time, I have published a blog post for using Github with Visual studio team explorer.  So with reference to this blog post, one of the users email me that how we can publish the existing applications to Github? So I thought it would be a great idea to write a blog post about it. So in this blog post, We are going to learn how we can publish existing application to Github with visual studio 2015. Visual Studio 2015 comes with Team explorer and when you install the visual studio 2015 there is an option to install the Github extension for visual studio. If you have not installed it then you can also insert separately from the following link.

https://visualstudio.github.com/

How to publish existing applications to Github with Visual Studio 2015:

To demonstrate this we are going to use console application, So I have created a core console application with File-> New project.



Once created application, I have added it to the source via right clicking solution explorer and Click on Add Solution to Source control.



It will add the solution to default source control, In my visual studio git is configured as default source control. But if it not there it will ask between Git or Team server. Once you click on add solution to source control it will create a local git repository. Now It’s time to write some code. Here is a sample code that I have written.

using System;

namespace GithubConsoleApp
{
    public class Program
    {
        public static void Main(string[] args)
        {
            Console.Write("Github sample application");
            Console.ReadLine();
        }
    }
}

Now it's time to commit code to Local Git repository with team explorer like following.



Now once you click sync it will try to sync with the remote repository of GIT since we don’t have the remote repository.



Here, there are three options available, Github, Team Services or custom remote repository. Since we are going to use Github so click on GetStarted for GitHub option. It will load following screen.



Here in above screenshot, My Github account is already configured otherwise it will ask for your Github Credentials.  Now click on publish it will create a new repository in Github and publish the whole history to GitHub also.



You can see the same thing on Github.com also.



That’s it. It’s very easy to use Github tools with Visual Studio 2015. Hope you like it. Stay tuned for more!!.

You can find sample Github repository used in this application at - https://github.com/dotnetjalps/GithubConsoleApp

Continue Reading