Visual Studio is an integrated development environment (IDE) from Microsoft. It's computer software, and a tool that can be used to write, debug, and execute code. Visual Studio is one of the most popular IDEs available in the industry, and is mainly used for .NET applications. As it is from Microsoft, it makes .NET development very easy and smooth. You can use Visual Studio for other programming languages, but I can't guarantee that it will be the most useful option; however, for C# developers like me, this is the best Integrated Development Environment (IDE) available. As a developer, I spend most of my time in Visual Studio.

At the time of writing this book, the latest version of Visual Studio is Visual Studio 2017. Microsoft has introduced different editions of Visual Studio. One of these, the Community edition, is free. There are also two other editions: Visual Studio Professional and Visual Studio Enterprise. The Professional and Enterprise editions are not free, and are more suitable for big projects. In this book, we will explore the features of the Community edition, as that is free and has sufficient functionalities for the purposes of this book.

In this chapter, we will learn about the features of Visual Studio. We will cover the following topics:

• Visual Studio project types and templates
• Visual Studio Editor and the different windows
• Debugging windows
• Breakpoints, Call Stack Trace, and Watch
• Git in Visual Studio
• Refactoring and code-optimization techniques