Who Should Read This Book?

Developers looking to use Visual Studio (Community, Professional, or Enterprise) to build great apps for users will want to read this book. Of course, established .NET developers who rely on Visual Studio to get work done will also want to read this book to ensure they are getting the most out of their chosen toolset. This book covers both using the IDE and building most of the many types of applications Visual Studio supports. It covers all of the following key topics:

Writing code using Visual Basic and C#

Understanding the basics of solutions, projects, editors, and designers

Writing IDE extensions and add-ins

Writing unit tests to verify your code works as designed

Debugging code with the IDE

Refactoring your code

Building websites using the new ASP.NET 5 (and MVC 6) model, which includes support for Bower client-side package management and the new .NET Core 5 for running ASP.NET applications on Windows, Mac, and Linux

Using JavaScript and the many client-side frameworks such as Knockout, AngularJS, and Bootstrap to create great web experiences

Developing service-based solutions for web and mobile clients using ASP.NET Web API and Windows Communication Foundation (WCF)

Creating Windows desktop and Store applications using Windows Presentation Foundation (WPF)

Working with data and databases and leveraging LINQ and Entity Framework to build data-centric applications

Using Microsoft Office and Visual Studio to create enterprise solutions based on common office tools (Word, Excel, and so on)

Creating Windows Azure applications that live in the cloud

Developing applications for Windows Phone

Building cross-platform mobile applications that run on iOS, Android, and Windows Phone using Apache Cordova and related tools

This book has one primary focus: detailing and explaining the intricacies of the Visual Studio 2015 IDE to enable developers to be work faster and, ultimately, work smarter. Although we do provide a language primer, those just starting out with Visual Basic or C# may want a companion book that focuses solely on their language of choice. If you can write C# or Visual Basic code, this book will radically help you optimize your productivity with Visual Studio.

This book focuses primarily on Visual Studio 2015 Professional edition (which also covers the Community edition). There are additional features in Visual Studio Enterprise. However, those are mostly not covered by this book. Instead, we dedicate space to the version of the product used by the majority of .NET developers all over the world.