From the course: Visual Studio 2019 Essential Training

Visual Studio overview for beginners - Visual Studio Tutorial

From the course: Visual Studio 2019 Essential Training

Start my 1-month free trial

Visual Studio overview for beginners

“

- [Instructor] Visual Studio has been around for a long time. It is a huge application, packed with tons of features that aid your daily coding process. In this course we'll explore the essential tools available in this magnificent application. But before I do, I want to talk about you, my fellow explorer. About your skills, and what videos to watch in this chapter. What type of programmer are you? Are you just beginning to code? Have you heard that Visual Studio is the top programmer's tool for Microsoft development, but you've had little time to experiment with its tool set? If so, this video is for you. Or perhaps you are an experienced programmer on another platform. You've worked in Java and Ruby and are transitioning to the Microsoft platform for a new job. If so, this video is also for you. The purpose of this video is to explain the ideas behind Visual Studio, and provide an overview of what's in the application. Believe me, it's a long list of tools. I'll get to that in a minute, but first let me talk to the veteran Microsoft programmer in the audience. What about those of you who are long time Visual Studio users? I know there are a lot of you. According to Microsoft there are millions of developers working in Visual Studio. If you are experienced, most of the topics in this course will be familiar to you. Look at the list of videos to see which ones appeal to you. For a deeper dive, check out my comprehensive Visual Studio Essential series. Visual Studio 2019 is very similar to Visual Studio 2017, and Visual Studio 2015, and most of the concepts in that series apply to Visual Studio 2019. To get an overview of the improvements for 2019, watch my Visual Studio 2019 First Look course. So, if you are encountering Visual Studio for the first time, a natural question to ask is what is Visual Studio? Visual Studio is a tool for developers available in paid and free versions. It is also a family of related tools playable with the Visual Studio and as Azure Branding. I'll start by looking at the concept of IDEs. There are many levels of sophistication in software applications. If you want to write a simple note, a tool like Notepad will do, but for more sophisticated document editing, you'll turn to a tool like Microsoft Word or Google Docs. Why, because they contain a suite of tools that help you assemble a more interesting document. For example, one with footers, a table of contents, and an index. It also contains grammar, spell checking tools, and more. It's the same in photo editing. You can work in a simple tool like Paint, or use a full featured alternative like Adobe Photoshop. In the programming world, we call the applications that contain a set of comprehensive tools and integrated development environment or IDE. Here is the Visual Studio IDE. It is full of dockable windows which contain dozens of task specific tools. On the far left, you can see the document outline and the data source items nestled against the app border. Then there is the server explorer. On the right side of the screen is the solution explorer and the properties window. In the center is the XAML designer window and a XAML and C# text editor. In the lower right, is the text explorer window. Learn to love this interface as you will spend a good portion of your workday within its boundaries. Ask most people what they think a programmer does while at work, and they'll probably say writing code. One of the features that makes Visual Studio successful is its detailed support for code editors. These editing tools attempt to ease the burden of writing and editing code. Visual Studio contains editors for all the major languages. You'll find the bracket languages like C++ and C#. There are other Microsoft specific languages like F#, which is the new functional language, and Visual Basic, the easy to learn modern.net language. Plus there are editors for scripting languages like JavaScript and Microsoft's new TypeScript Transpiler language. Nowadays building apps also requires working with markup files. Visual Studios has editors for all the major markup languages. You'll be able to see colorized views of XML files. The HTML editor is powerful and has many auto completion and tag checking features. JSON files are supported too, and there is one for XAML, which is the markup for Windows Desktop, Windows Phone, and store applications. For the web developer, you'll also love the CSS editor. So we've seen that Visual Studio has lots of editors. Now let's look at the types of applications you can create. The number of projects available in Visual Studio is astounding. If you can think if a project that targets Microsoft technology, there's probably a template for it available in Visual Studio. Here you cans see in the Language drop down it shows the language scope. In the Platform drop down is the ability to target operating systems like Windows, macOS, and Linux. There's mobile platforms like Android, and iOS, and Microsoft platforms like Azure and Xbox. And the last drop down is the big list of project types. You can build Unity games, or IoT libraries, automate Microsoft Office and write code for machine learning. As you can see, Visual Studio is flexible and caters to a wide range of developers. You pick your favorite programming language, pick your target platforms, and start building a vast array of applications and services. Once you start coding, Visual Studio provides additional tools to assist you when building applications and services. From debuggers to database tools, there's a lot to learn, and that's what we'll look at in the next video.

Contents