An overview of Visual Studio 2022 updates

Some of the changes in Visual Studio 2022 affect all editions. For example, you can now create applications for these platforms using various C# templates:

• Windows
• Android
• iOS
• Linux
• macOS
• Other technologies and platforms (see the list at https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/visualstudio/releases/2022/compatibility#developOther for details). Many of these other technologies and platforms won’t affect your C# development.

The biggest news, however, is that Visual Studio 2022 is a fully 64-bit environment now, which means that you can make fuller use of all the functionality that your system provides. In addition, Visual Studio 2022 is noticeably faster in some areas than it was in the past. Fortunately, your 32-bit applications continue to run fine in the new environment.

As you read through this book, you also find mentions of .NET 6.0 updates that affect how you code. Some of the updates are significant, and you notice them immediately. Other updates are subtle, but you can find them if you look. You can see a list of .NET 6.0 updates at https://devblogs.microsoft.com/dotnet/announcing-net-6-preview-7/. What may surprise you is how many of these updates you have already noticed without really being aware of them because they’re under the covers.

Whether you call it IntelliSense, IntelliCode, or something else altogether, this feature of Visual Studio saves you time by helping you make corrections to your code as you type and also by making suggestions. In this version of Visual Studio, you definitely want to remember the Tab key because pressing Tab allows you to complete major code segments quickly, easily, and without error. At the end of the day, you may amaze yourself at your productivity after you get used to the new IntelliSense (the name used in this book) features. It’s the most noticeable and welcome feature for many developers.

The new debugging support will bedazzle you with all sorts of gizmos, charts, graphs, blinking lights, and pizzazz of every sort. However, you may find that you really don’t use much of it unless you work on a large project. The debugger does tell you more about what is wrong with your application, and this feature does save time. For the most part, however, you find that you use the same debugging techniques as in the past with just a bit more help from the IDE.

Community edition

The Community edition is the free version of Visual Studio. It’s made for hobbyists, classrooms, and academic research, but many professional programmers use it as their edition of choice for small personal projects, or for working on open source projects. Microsoft also targets this edition to small organizations that have five or fewer developers. So if you work for a small company, you might not need anything more than this edition, which means that C# development will remain free.

Although the Community edition is a little less functional than the Professional edition, you can compile every code example in this book by using the Community edition. It has the power of the .NET Framework, which is also free, and gives you a significant means of learning C#. From a development platform perspective, the Community edition supports everything that all the other editions support, including

• Windows Desktop
• Universal Windows Platform, or UWP (formerly known as Universal Windows Apps)
• Universal Application Platform (UAP)
• Web (ASP.NET)
• Azure development
• Cloud development
• Office 365
• Business Applications
• Apache Cordova
• C++ Cross-Platform Library Development
• Python
• Node.js
• .NET Core
• Git support
• Docker Tools

New to Visual Studio versions 2019 and above are cross-platform tools that help you create applications for all the non-Windows platforms that C# now supports. Here are the features you can expect:

• Remote iOS Simulator for Windows
• The ability to share code between Android and iOS using Xamarin (https://dotnet.microsoft.com/apps/xamarin), a platform for building iOS and Android apps using C# and .NET
• Native iOS and Android UI Designers
• Xamarin.Forms

In the past, the various Express and academic editions gave people a taste of what they could do with C#, but tended to move them toward the paid Professional edition. With Visual Studio 2022, Microsoft takes a different route and gives you everything needed to fully experience C#. You even have access to many advanced debugging and diagnostic tools, testing tools, and cross-platform templates. The chart at https://www.visualstudio.com/vs/compare/ provides a full comparison.

What the Community edition lacks is enterprise-level support. It’s important to note that Microsoft defines an enterprise as an entity having more than 250 PCs or more than $1 million U.S. dollars in annual revenue. If you find that you need enterprise-type support but don’t have an enterprise-sized organization, you need the Professional edition. However, for most developers, the Community edition provides everything needed to discover and use the wonders of C#.

Professional edition

Besides designing the Professional edition to work in a larger, enterprise environment, Microsoft endowed the Professional edition with one necessary addition: CodeLens (https://docs.microsoft.com/visualstudio/ide/find-code-changes-and-other-history-with-codelens). This feature is designed to help you look at your code in a detailed manner. Think about it as a sort of magnifying glass for code. You can use CodeLens to perform these sorts of tasks:

• Find references to your code wherever they might exist.
• Review the code history and determine how changes might affect your code.
• Manage the branches in your code.
• Determine who made code changes.
• Contact other team members about changes using Lync or Skype.
• Track linked code reviews and linked bugs.
• Locate and manage unit tests for your code.

Enterprise edition

There is a huge difference in functionality between the Professional edition and the Enterprise edition. Yes, the Community edition, Professional edition, and Enterprise edition can all create the same kinds of projects, but the tools required to design, build, test, and manage really large projects reside in the Enterprise edition. For example, all the architectural features, such as Architectural Layer Diagrams and Architecture Validation, are part of the Enterprise edition. If you want to validate your design, you need Live Dependency Validation, which is a truly amazing feature described at https://docs.microsoft.com/visualstudio/modeling/validate-code-with-layer-diagrams.

The management features are also designed around the huge project environment. For example, Code Clone (https://docs.microsoft.com/previous-versions/hh205279(v=vs.140)) provides the means to detect duplicate code in your project. After all, when a project is huge, multiple developers are apt to come up with the same way to perform specific tasks. Ensuring that you don’t have to maintain multiple copies of the same code reduces costs and makes the code easier to manage (not to mention that it eliminates some of the nastier bugs).

You also receive some truly advanced functionality for performing diagnostics and debugging your code. In addition, the Enterprise edition contains additional cross-platform support. However, where the Enterprise edition truly shines is with testing tools. When working with the Community edition or Professional edition, all you get is unit testing. However, the Enterprise edition provides all these other forms of testing:

• Live Unit Testing
• IntelliTest
• Microsoft Fakes (Unit Test Isolation)
• Code Coverage
• Snapshot Debugger
• Time Travel Debugging (see the walkthrough at https://docs.microsoft.com/windows-hardware/drivers/debugger/time-travel-debugging-walkthrough)

There are also new cross-platform development features (starting in Visual Studio 2019) that help you create applications that work across multiple platforms. This includes Xamarin support, as shown here:

• Embedded Assemblies
• Xamarin Inspector
• Xamarin Profiler

MSDN

The Microsoft Developer Network (MSDN) subscription is by far the best way to get Microsoft products. It may seem as though setting up a development environment to develop anything of significance would be impossibly expensive. This is not necessarily the case.

The MSDN subscription is exactly what it sounds like — a subscription to a majority of the Microsoft products that matter. For around $1,199.00 for the first year and $799.00 a year after that for a Professional edition subscription, you get access to everything you need. This isn’t actually an edition of Visual Studio. (You can learn more about the various subscription costs for the Visual Studio component at https://visualstudio.microsoft.com/subscriptions/ and the MSDN Platforms component at https://visualstudio.microsoft.com/msdn-platforms/.)

That MSDN Platforms fee sounds like a lot, but think about it this way: Even if you do only one project a year on your own time, your investment will pay off. Considering the fact that Visual Studio alone is half of that, and it gets a revision every two years or so, it’s a bargain. Along with Visual Studio Professional, you also get subscriptions to a wealth of software that would take pages to list here, but you can see a complete list at https://visualstudio.microsoft.com/vs/pricing-details/.

Exploring the Create a New Project dialog box

You start all new projects by using the New Project dialog box, shown in Figure 1-1. It’s possible to access this dialog box in a number of ways. The most common technique is to choose Create a New Project when Visual Studio starts. However, you can also choose File ⇒ New ⇒ Project. When adding a new project to an existing solution, you can also right-click the solution entry in Solution Explorer and choose Add ⇒   New Project.

To make it easier to choose a template, you see the templates you’ve used recently listed on the left side. You can simply select one of these entries and click Next to continue the wizard. You can also search for templates by criteria using the search field at the top. Otherwise, you can select entries in the three drop-down list boxes to choose a template that way.

What you see after you choose a template depends on the wizard for that template. However, Microsoft has attempted to standardize the wizards to some extent. You usually see three (or sometimes more) important text boxes when you click Next after choosing a template:

• Name: The name of this project.
• Location: The path to the project file.
• (Optional) Solution: Determines whether the new project is part of the existing solution or is part of a new solution.
• Solution Name: The name of the solution. Solutions are collections of projects.
• Framework: The version of the .NET Framework you want to use.

There is sometimes a third or fourth page of the wizard, asking you for additional information. Just follow the prompts and you’ll soon see the IDE, where you can begin editing your code.

Understanding solutions and projects

Visual Studio project files, and the solutions that love them, are a constant topic of interest to Microsoft developers. You work on one solution at a time, with a number of projects within. How you organize your solutions and their projects will make or break you when it comes time to find something.

You can think of solutions as folders that hold projects. They’re just folders with special properties. The second page of the wizard has a special check box entitled Place Solution and Project in the Same Directory. You deselect this option when you want to add multiple projects to a single solution and want each project to have its own directory within the solution. Keeping projects separate makes it easier to reuse a project in another application.

Projects are where you put the code files for your programs. They store all kinds of things, like references to the .NET Framework, resources like graphics or files, and what file should be used to start the project.

Solutions do the same thing for projects that projects do for files. They keep the projects in a folder and store certain properties. For instance, they store which project should be started when debugging starts.

Neither the project nor the solutions have much to do with a finished program. They are just simple organizational structures for Visual Studio. The installation of the finished program is determined by the setup project.

In reality, the solution is more than a folder. It’s a file in a folder that is used by Visual Studio to manage the developer experience. So, inside the folder for the solution is a file describing the projects within and then a bunch of folders containing the projects themselves.

There are files for the projects, too — files that describe the resources and references for the project. They are all XML files that contain text references to the values that you set using Visual Studio. Normally, you don’t need to look at the solution or project files. The results of any organization you perform appears in Solution Explorer. Figure 1-2 shows a typical example of a simple application setup consisting of a solution (CheckCIA) and two projects (CIAAssembly and InternalLimitsAccess). Each of the projects contains the files associated with that project, such as CIAAssembly.cs in the CIAAssembly project.