Visual Studio is a powerful tool for developing your apps. If you haven't done so already, go ahead and download and install Visual Studio. See the video Getting Started with Visual Studio – Setting up your IDE for more information about downloading Visual Studio and configuring it the way you want.
Visual Studio has a group of tool windows, menus, and toolbars collectively known as the integrated development environment, or IDE. The Visual Studio IDE helps you accomplish your development tasks. Here's a quick overview of IDE items you will likely use most often.
One of the most heavily-used tool windows in Visual Studio, this is where you write, view, and navigate through your code.
As you enter code, the code editor helps you more quickly and easily write and find your code by providing features such as statement completion, syntax colorization, map mode, and more. For more information, see the video Getting Started with Visual Studio - Editing and navigating your code
Some solution types may include forms, such as WPF or Windows Forms. In those cases, you will also see a visual designer in this space that lets you visually add controls to the form, such as buttons and list boxes.
A tool window called Solution Explorer lists all your code files. Solution Explorer can help organize your code by grouping its files into solutions and projects. The project in bold is called the startup project. It’s the first code that runs when you start your solution. You can change the startup project. See the video Getting Started with Visual Studio – Building blocks of the IDE for more information.
In addition to solutions and projects, Solution Explorer lists all the files in each project when you expand the project's node. Each project contains one or more files, such as source code files and resource files such as images or libraries.
To see properties for solutions, projects, and files, choose the Properties command on the shortcut (right-click) menu, or choose View, Properties Window on the menu.
You don't have to create a solution or project, however, to get started coding. You can simply jump right in and open code files in Visual Studio, such as files cloned from a Git repo, and start editing them right away. The files will appear in Solution Explorer and get syntax colorization, basic statement completion, and more, just like traditional solutions. See Open Any Folder for more information.
To run your project, create new solutions, save files, and more, use the Visual Studio toolbar and menu commands. For example, once your code is ready to run for debugging, you can choose the Start button on the toolbar, or you can choose Debug, Start Debugging on the menu. To create a new solution, choose the New Project button, or choose File, New, Project on the menu, and so forth.
Note that toolbar icons and menu commands can change depending on the context, meaning the item currently selected.
Team Explorer enables you to connect to source control tools such as Git and Team Foundation Version Control (TFVC) to store your code locally or share it with others on a hosted service. You can also use it to track tasks and more.
See the videos Getting Started with Visual Studio – Building blocks of the IDE and Getting Started with Visual Studio – Opening a project from Source Control for more information.
The Output window is where Visual Studio sends its notifications, such as debugging and error messages, compiler warnings, publishing status messages, and more. Each message type has its own tab.
To learn more about how to use the Output window for debugging, see The Output window while debugging with Visual Studio.
- Setup - To learn about how to download and set up Visual Studio, see Setup & Installation.
- The basics - To learn more about how Visual Studio works, see Get Started Developing with Visual Studio.
- Settings - Customize Visual Studio for how you like to work. See Personalizing the Visual Studio IDE.
- Tutorials - To learn more about how to develop code in Visual Studio, go through a tutorial, such as Getting Started with Visual C# and Visual Basic or Getting Started with C++ in Visual Studio.
- Videos - To learn more about other features and aspects of Visual Studio, check out videos on the Microsoft Visual Studio channel on YouTube, or Visual Studio videos on Channel 9.
If you want to use cloud-based resources in your app or game, you can do that by including Azure services. You can get the Azure SDK for .NET by installing the Azure workload using the new Visual Studio Installer. The packages that are installed are at the same feature level as the 2.9.5 version of the SDK. For this version of Visual Studio and all future versions, the Azure SDK for .NET will only be available from the Visual Studio installer.
After installing Azure SDK for .NET, a new tool window becomes available in Visual Studio called Cloud Explorer. Cloud Explorer enables you to browse and manage your Azure assets and resources from within Visual Studio. If a particular operation requires the Azure portal, Cloud Explorer provides links that take you to the place in the Azure portal you need to go.
To learn more about using Cloud Explorer, see Managing Azure resources with Cloud Explorer. Installing Azure SDK also gives you Visual Studio Tools for Azure as well as other tools.
For shortcuts and handy tips and tricks on how to get more out of Visual Studio, see the following.