Visual Studio productivity guide for C# developers

Applies to: Visual Studio Visual Studio for Mac

Learn how Visual Studio makes developers more productive than ever. Take advantage of our performance and productivity improvements like navigation to decompiled assemblies, variable name suggestions as you type, a hierarchy-view in Test Explorer, Go To All (Ctrl+T) to navigate to file/type/member/symbol declarations, an intelligent Exception Helper, code style configuration and enforcement, and many refactorings and code fixes.

I'm used to keyboard shortcuts from a different editor

If you're coming from another IDE or coding environment, you can change your keyboard scheme to Visual Studio Code or ReSharper (Visual Studio):

Some extensions also offer keyboard schemes:

• HotKeys for Visual Studio (ReSharper/IntelliJ)
• Emacs Emulation
• VSVim

The following are popular Visual Studio shortcuts:

For more information about keyboard shortcuts and commands, see Productivity shortcuts and Popular keyboard shortcuts.

Navigate quickly to files or types

Visual Studio has a feature called Go To All (Ctrl+T). Go To All enables you to quickly jump to any file, type, member, or symbol declaration.

• Change the location of this search bar or turn off the live navigation preview by using the gear icon.
• Filter results using syntax such as t mytype.
• Scope your search to just the current document.
• Camel case matching is supported.

Enforce code style rules

You can use an EditorConfig file to codify coding conventions and have them travel with your source.

• Add a default or .NET-style EditorConfig file to your project by choosing Add > New Item. In the Add New Item dialog box, search for "editorconfig". Select either of the editorconfig File item templates and then choose Add.

  

• The code inference feature of IntelliCode for Visual Studio infers your code styles from existing code. It then creates a non-empty EditorConfig file with your code-style preferences already defined.

• Configure the severity level of a code style rule directly through the editor. If you currently do not have an .editorconfig file, one will be generated for you. Place your cursor on the error, warning, or suggestion and type Ctrl+. to open the Quick Actions and Refactorings menu. Select Configure or Suppress issues. Then select the rule and choose the severity level you would like to configure for that rule. This will update your existing EditorConfig with the rule’s new severity.

  

Check out the .NET coding convention options documentation, which also contains an example of a complete EditorConfig file.

Refactorings and code fixes

Visual Studio comes with numerous refactorings, code generation actions, and code fixes. Red squiggles represent errors, green squiggles represent warnings, and three gray dots represent code suggestions. You can access code fixes by clicking the light bulb or screwdriver icon, or by pressing Ctrl+. or Alt+Enter. Each fix comes with a preview window that shows a live code diff of how the fix works.

Popular quick fixes and refactorings include:

• Rename
• Extract Method
• Change Method Signature
• Generate Constructor
• Generate Method
• Move Type to File
• Add Null-Check
• Add Parameter
• Remove Unnecessary Usings
• Foreach Loop to LINQ Query or to LINQ method
• Pull Members Up

For more information, see code generation features.

You can install FxCop analyzers to flag code issues. Or, write your own refactoring or code fix with Roslyn analyzers.

Several community members have written free extensions that add additional code inspections:

Find Usages, Go To Implementation, and Navigate To Decompiled Assemblies

Visual Studio has many features to help you search and navigate your code.

Improved IntelliSense

Use IntelliCode for Visual Studio to get context-aware code completions instead of just an alphabetical list. You can also train a custom IntelliSense model based on your own domain-specific libraries.

Unit testing

Starting in Visual Studio 2017, there are numerous improvements to the testing experience. You can test with the MSTest v1, MSTest v2, NUnit, or XUnit test frameworks.

• Test Explorer test discovery is fast.

• Organize your tests in Test Explorer with hierarchical sorting.

  

• Live unit testing continuously runs tests impacted by your code changes and updates inline editor icons to let you know the status of your tests. Include or exclude specific tests or test projects from your live test set. (Visual Studio Enterprise edition only.)

Debugging

Some of Visual Studio's debugging capabilities include:

Version control

You can use git or TFVC to store and update your code in Visual Studio.

• Organize your local changes in Team Explorer and use the status bar to track pending commits and changes.

• Set up continuous integration and delivery for your ASP.NET projects inside of Visual Studio with the Continuous delivery tools for Visual Studio extension.

What other features should I know about?

Here is a list of editor and productivity features to make writing code more efficient. Some features may need to be enabled because they are off by default (they may index things on your machine, are controversial, or are currently experimental).