Visual Studio 2017 Essentials and Beyond

Course Overview
Hi everyone, my name is Kate Gregory, and welcome to my course Visual Studio 2017 Essentials and Beyond. I'm a consultant and mentor at Gregory Consulting. I've been using Visual Studio ever since it was first released, and I still do essentially all of my development work, in a variety of languages, in Visual Studio. If you use Microsoft technologies, and even if you don't, then you probably need to use Visual Studio. But it's so big. How can you be great at it? This course will show you how. This course is what you need to get started as a Visual Studio user or to make sure you're using it to the fullest. Some of the major topics that we'll cover include the common patterns and commands that work throughout Visual Studio; how to explore, navigate, search, and discover your way through code you didn't write; how to type less and do less work to get your code written the way you want; how to debug effectively; and customizing and extending Visual Studio to make it work best for you. By the end of this course, you'll know how to get the most out of Visual Studio and work in the way that's most productive for you. Before beginning the course, you should be familiar with the steps involved in developing software. It doesn't matter what language, platform or tools you've used as long as you've edited code, tried to debug, and maybe tried to build a user interface. I hope you'll join me on this journey to learn how to get the most out of Visual Studio with the Visual Studio 2017 Essentials and Beyond course at Pluralsight.

Getting Started
Hi, welcome to Visual Studio 2017 Essentials and Beyond. My name is Kate Gregory. In this course, I'm going to show you around Visual Studio so you can use it more effectively to get your development tasks done quickly and with less pain. Whether you're just getting started and don't really know where to begin, or are experienced with Visual Studio but wonder if you're doing some things the hard way, in this course I assure you you'll learn what you need to know about Visual Studio. We'll start simple, but definitely end up in power user territory. Visual Studio is a very large and complicated product. It has dozens of toolbars, menus, special windows and panes, and all kinds of different editors and designers. People use it to create a huge variety of applications, and it's packed with features to help them, but those features may have nothing to do with the particular kind of work you're doing, and that can make it hard to know where to even start. In this module, I'll show you a road map to the course as a whole, and get started with some of the basic terminology in Visual Studio.

Projects and Solutions
Welcome back to Visual Studio 2017 Essentials and Beyond. My name is Kate Gregory, and in this course, I'm showing you around Visual Studio so that you can use it more effectively to get your development tasks done quickly, and with less pain. In this module, I'll clarify Visual Studio solutions and projects, and show you how a typical architecture where you have a user interface layer and a business logic layer, gets represented in Visual Studio. I'll create a simple application, first all as one project, and then separated into a UI project and a business logic project so you can compare them.

Namespaces, Folders, and Files
Welcome back to Visual Studio 2017 Essentials and Beyond. My name is Kate Gregory, and in this course, I'm showing you around Visual Studio so that you can use it more effectively to get your development tasks done quickly and with less pain. In this module, I'll show you how a typical architecture where you have a user interface layer and a business logic layer, gets represented in Visual Studio, and also on your hard drive. I want to explain namespaces, which are an important. NET concept, and then show you some behind-the-scenes mechanics, so you understand a little bit more about how Visual Studio works. After all, it isn't really magic.

Understanding and Personalizing Visual Studio UI Components
Welcome back to Visual Studio 2017 Essentials and Beyond. My name is Kate Gregory, and in this course, I'm showing you around Visual Studio so you can use it more effectively to get your development tasks done quickly and with less pain. In this module, I'll show you some more of the interface of Visual Studio, specifically, all the windows, toolbars, menus, and views, they're all available to you. It can be difficult at first to know what they could be for, why you would care about them, so I'll show you, and also how you can arrange things the way you like them.

Exploring Relationships in Your Code
welcome back to Visual Studio 2017 Essentials to the Power User. My name is Kate Gregory, and in this course, I'm showing you around Visual Studio so that you can use it more effectively to get your development tasks done quickly and with less pain. In this module, I want to show you the many ways that Visual Studio helps you to explore code, whether that's code you wrote, or on a project, perhaps, that you're just joining. People spend a lot of time trying to navigate amongst all the different files that make up a solution, and then navigating further inside those files, and there are some huge productivity gains available to developers if you can quickly find what you're looking for, instead of spending all that time navigating from file to file.

Using Search and Find Effectively
Welcome back to Visual Studio 2017 Essentials and Beyond. My name is Kate Gregory, and in this course, I'm showing you around Visual Studio so that you can use it more effectively to get your development tasks done quickly, and with less pain. In this module, I'll focus on looking for things when you know the name of them. You'll learn more kinds of Find than you might have thought possible, and some specialized views that are more powerful than Find. I'll also introduce you to some unexpected places you can search, and then I'll show you how to be quicker with one of the most frustrating parts of software development, fixing compiler errors.

Letting Visual Studio Help You
Hi. Welcome back to Visual Studio 2017 Essentials and Beyond. My name is Kate Gregory, and in this course, I'm showing you around Visual Studio so you can use it more effectively to get your development tasks done quickly and with less pain. And this module is about how Visual Studio can help you write new code, and edit code. There's a slow and steady way to do this, and there's a set of much faster ways. I want to show you some of the ways that Visual Studio can help you get your work done faster. Often this just means saving you two or three clicks or 10 or 15 keystrokes, but that's not the key to what makes you more productive. You see, one minute your head is all full of a plan, you're thinking, I'm going to loop through all the whatevers, and check to see if they need to be updated, and if they do I'll update them, but the next minute you're swearing under your breath because you forgot to declare a variable or add a reference, or something. And when Visual Studio offers you a feature that turns that disruption into nothing more than a moment's nuisance, you stay in flow, you keep that plan in your head. And that's where you get the big productivity boost, from just keeping going, and not getting derailed from the plan that you started with. So two or three clicks can actually turn out to be a really big deal.

Basic Debugging Features
Hi. Welcome back to Visual Studio 2017 Essentials and Beyond. My name is Kate Gregory, and in this course, I'm showing you around Visual Studio. I want to use it more effectively so you can get your development tasks done quickly, and with less pain. This module will introduce the basic debugging features in Visual Studio. You can use these to understand how a program works, to find bugs in it, and to confirm you fixed them.

Additional Debugging Features
Hi, welcome back to Visual Studio 2017 Essentials and Beyond. My name is Kate Gregory, and in this course, I'm showing you around Visual Studio. I want you to use it more effectively, and get your development tasks quickly and with less pain. In this module, I'll show you how to take your debugging skills from the basic to the powerful, and this is an aspect of using Visual Studio where I see a huge variation in abilities. Some developers struggle for literally hours trying to see why something is happening, while others use a few of the more advanced features and see the problem in minutes. I can't show you everything, but I will take you beyond the basics and give you a debugging foundation you can build on.

Working With Designers
Welcome back to Visual Studio 2017 Essentials and Beyond. My name is Kate Gregory, and I'm showing you around Visual Studio so that you can use it more effectively. I want you to get your development tasks done quickly and with less pain. In this module, I'm going to turn from code to user interface, and specifically the designers in Visual Studio that you use to build your user interface. There are a lot of them, and they're all a little different. But the good news is there's a lot of overlap, so when you learn how to use one, you often know quite a lot about the others as well. The not so good news is, those overlapping features seem to be the ones most people don't know about, so I'm going to fix that.

Useful Extensions
Welcome back to Visual Studio 2017 Essentials and Beyond. My name is Kate Gregory, and I'm showing you around Visual Studio so you can use it more effectively to get your development tasks done quickly, and with less pain. By now, you probably know Visual Studio pretty well. Especially if you have experience with another development tool, there may be some things you wish Visual Studio did a little differently. Well, good news, Visual Studio can be extended, meaning other developers can write code that changes how Visual Studio works. In this module, I'm going to introduce you to some free extensions that can make your experience with Visual Studio even better.

IntelliTrace and Code Map
Welcome back to Visual Studio 2017 Essentials and Beyond. My name is Kate Gregory. I'm showing you around Visual Studio so you can use it more effectively and get your development tasks done quickly and with less pain. IntelliTrace, it's like time travel for debugging. In this module, I'll show you how to go back to when a bug happened and look at values and flow so that you can see what happened. I'll even show you how you can debug something that happened on another computer. It sounds impossible, but it's not only possible, it's actually pretty easy. I also want to talk to you about Code Map. That's a feature that lets you to understand how large or complicated code bases work by constructing a diagram as you debug. And the reason I've put these two features together is they are both in the Enterprise edition of Visual Studio, and only in the Enterprise edition. Everything else you've seen throughout this course has been in pretty much every version of Visual Studio, but these two are Enterprise only.