10 New features of Visual Studio 2015 that you should know

The Visual Studio 2015 is here and it included many new and great features. They not only improve the way we work, it also improve the productivity of developers during development. There are lot of improvement in tooling including desktop, mobile, web app, Store App and even more towards the cross platform development. As I said, there are many, here I am sharing 10 of those new features I already published in Daily .NET Tips site, which would development improve your way of development.

Learn these new feature, explore new.. and have a great journey with Visual Studio 2015.

Let’s start with something that every .NET developer was looking for.

Debugging Lambda Expression in Visual Studio 2015 – Watch Windows, Immediate Windows and also in DataTips

Debugging Lambda expression is one of the coolest feature of Visual Studio 2015 and that’s bring lot of productivity among developers during debugging and release lot of pain. Using lambda expression is pretty often in code, mostly when we writes lots of LINQ statements. Priory to Visual Studio 2015, there was no direct and easy way, where we can debug, or inspect any lambda expression. Now, Visual Studio 2015, support debug and run lambda express in Watch Windows, Immediate Window and in DataTips as well Read More…

Next one is really interesting and really cool for the developer who works on multiple devices or monitors.

Create your own development layouts based on devices / monitors / environments you are using

This feature let us customize the overall IDE experience and reuse it further. This becomes very handy if you develop on multiple devices or multiple monitors, and generally most of the developer does that. We develop applications either in Laptop, Tablet and as well as large screen monitors. Depends on the screen size and space availability, generally we move around the common windows, such as – Toolbox, Solution explorer, Server Explorer etc. Visual Studio 2015 now allows us to create our own windows layouts and use it one other devices, screens without reorganizing it again. It is just, create once, and use it anytime on your preferred devices.

What about sharing a project that can be used all across other applications..

Using Shared Project across multiple applications

Shared Project is a great way of sharing common code across multiple application We already have experienced with the Shared Project type in Visual Studio 2013 as part of Windows 8.1 Universal App Development, But with Visual Studio 2015, it is a Standalone New Project Template; and we can use it with other types of app like Console, Desktop, Phone, Store App etc.. This types of project is extremely helpful when we want to share a common code, logic as well as components across multiple applications with in single platform. This also allow to access the platform specific API’s , assets etc. Read more…

One of coolest and great feature .. PerfTips and Debug Diagnostic.. here you go..

PerfTips – Easiest way to get Performance Information during Debugging

It had been always a pain point for developers to find out execution time, performance issues for different code block. Most of the time we Get time of Code Execution Using Stopwatch , or other logging mechanism, profiler tool etc. However, they are time consuming and sometime does not add values to check for a single methods, smaller code segments. Visual Studio 2015 makes our life easier. Getting the performance information is now in your finger tip and you can inspect this information during debugging itself. Read more..

Here is a quick tip on How To customize PerfTips Colors in Visual Studio 2015 ?

Focus on the code you are working on.. lets stop distracting…. Peek Definition helps here…

Peek Definition Everywhere – Using it with CSHTML, XAML, ASPX … along with C# in Visual Studio 2015

Peek Definition improves overall developers productivity and getting things in a smart manner with in the Visual Studio IDE. This provides a seamless view of source code without loosing the focus in different part. We have seen this features with C# code earlier version of Visual Studio and with productivity power tool. The fundamental of this features is very similar to how the traditional “Go To Definition” works. The only difference you will find is, it will display the code in the same window as an extended editor.

Along with C#, Visual Studio 2015 now introduced this features for XAML, CSHTML, ASPX ….. as well. Read more…

Write better code.. and test it with better code coverage using Smart Unit Testing….

Write Unit Test Automatically using IntelliTest in Visual Studio 2015

Visual Studio 2015 allows writing automatic unit test using “IntelliTest” in Visual Studio 2015. IntelliTest helps us to create Unit Test automatically that give maximum of code coverage. Read More..

New ways of connecting services…

Connecting Azure Storage Using Add Connected Services

Visual Studio 2015 helps you quickly build connected cloud application using “Add Connected Services” feature. We all are familiar with adding Project Reference, adding Services References from the Solution Explorer for any specific project. Add Connected Services is something new that you will experienced in Visual Studio 2015.

Open an instance of Visual Studio 2015, Create a new ASP.NET 5 project and right-click on the References in Solution Explorer and select Add Connected Service … Read more..

This is just an example… there are lot of stuff you can do with this little yellow bulb…

Simplest way of creating custom exceptions

.NET framework supports all kinds of exception types which are sufficient for most of the code bases, in some cases it may require to define custom exceptions in our applications. These may be just because of manage the overall exception handling in a simple way, make the code more readable with respect to solution or even in some cases because of design approach. Any Custom Exception that we create needs to derive from the System.Exception class. We can either directly derive from Exception or ApplicationException as a base class. Creating these exceptions class, derive them form base class and define the structures takes a while. Using Visual studio 2015, you can do a very quickly and can take a quick preview before you change in your codebase.

A new and inline look of Breakpoints settings….

Use Conditional Breakpoints with Methods Return Value

Conditional Breakpoint in Visual Studio is a great way to optimize the debugging time and pause the execution only when the condition satisfied. Along with the normal condition with in conditional breakpoint in visual studio, we can call a methods from the condition field and based on the return value debugger will stop at the breakpoint.

small but this is what give your old all CAPS menu back…

New Menu Bar Style

One of the small UI Improvement of Visual Studio 2015 IDE was main ‘Title Case’ Menu Bar Style instead of the ‘All CAPS’ Style. And, the ‘Title Case Style’ set as by default for Visual Studio 2015, where as for all the prior version of Visual Studio had only ALL CAPS Menu Style Option. In case if you want to revert back the menu style to ‘ALL CAPS’ from ‘Title Case’ , you can turn On/Off the ‘Apply title case styling to menu bar’ from Tools –> Options –> Environment –> General

Default Menu Bar (Title Case) of Visual Studio 2015