What visual studio ide feature can be used to discover information about methods you are using?

New to Visual Studio or coding in general? Take this step-by-step learning journey at your own pace to successfully create a simple app in any language of your choice. Let’s get started!

Why learn Visual Studio? Visual Studio empowers you to complete the entire development cycle in one place. For example, you can edit, debug, test, version control, and deploy to the cloud. With the diversity of features and languages in Visual Studio, you can grow from writing your first piece of code to developing in multiple project types. For example, you can build desktop and web apps with .NET, Mobile and gaming apps with C++.

Visual Studio is free for learning and individual use. First please make sure to download and install the latest version of Visual Studio. You can save installation time and disk space by selecting just the components needed. You can always incrementally add more components later at any time as needed.

To develop any type of app or learn a language, you’ll be working in the Visual Studio Integrated Development Environment (IDE). Beyond code editing, Visual Studio IDE brings together graphical designers, compilers, code completion tools, source control, extensions and many more features in one place. Watch this short video to get familiar with the IDE and to learn how to use it for basic tasks.

Prefer dark theme? Want to change the layout of windows to your liking? Have favorite keyboard shortcuts? Check out this short video where we walk you through some cool personalization options like themes, fonts, window layout and custom keyboard shortcuts available in Visual Studio.

Learn how to customize even more settings from these step-by-step tutorials

Start a tutorial

1. Choose an area of development you are most interested in learning
2. Follow the step-by-step tutorial to gain a basic understanding of building a simple application
3. Complete your learning by watching the video series and following the recommended beginner guides

IntelliCode saves you time by putting what you’re most likely to use at the top of your completion list. IntelliCode recommendations are based on thousands of open source projects on GitHub each with over 100 stars. When combined with the context of your code, the completion list is tailored to promote common practices.

IntelliCode isn’t limited to statement completion. Signature help also recommends the most likely overload for your context.

Team Completions

IntelliCode can provide recommendations based on your code and seamlessly share them across your team. With this preview feature, you can build a team model to provide recommendations on code that isn’t in the open source domain, such as methods on your own utility classes or domain specific library calls. Integrate our build task into your pipeline to keep your team completions up to date with repository changes.

Argument Completion

In addition to statement completion signature help, IntelliCode also makes argument recommendations to help you choose the right argument quickly.

Inferring code style and formatting conventions

Keep your code consistent easily with Visual Studio IntelliCode, which dynamically creates an .editorconfig file from your codebase to define coding styles and formats.

Note: We have several Preview features which are off by default and can be enabled through the Tools > Options > IntelliCode page.

IntelliCode is installed by default with any workload that supports C#, C++, TypeScript/JavaScript, or XAML in Visual Studio 2022.

IntelliCode saves you time by putting what you’re most likely to use at the top of your completion list. IntelliCode recommendations are based on thousands of open source projects on GitHub each with over 100 stars. When combined with the context of your code, the completion list is tailored to promote common practices.

When writing C++, IntelliCode will assist when using popular libraries such as STL . The context of your code is used to provide the most useful recommendations first. For example, when using std::string within a while-loop, the substr method is surfaced to the top.

Team Completions (Preview – C++)

IntelliCode can provide recommendations based on your code and seamlessly share them across your team. With this preview feature, you can build a team model for completions to provide recommendations on code that isn’t in the open source domain, such as methods on your own utility classes or domain specific library calls. When you enable automatic acquisition of team models, you can also seamlessly share your team model with anyone else working in that repository.

This feature comes installed by default with any workload that supports C#, C++, TypeScript/JavaScript, or XAML in Visual Studio 2022.

IntelliCode saves you time by putting what you’re most likely to use at the top of your completion list. IntelliCode recommendations are based on thousands of open source projects on GitHub each with over 100 stars. When combined with the context of your code, the completion list is tailored to promote common practices.

Recommendations for Controls and properties

When typing XAML, IntelliCode will recommend the Control you are most likely to use in that context. Additionally, within the context of a control, it will recommend the properties you are most likely to use, in the order in which you would have used them!

This feature comes installed by default with any workload that supports C#, C++, TypeScript/JavaScript, or XAML in Visual Studio 2022.

• Article
• 09/01/2022
• 6 minutes to read

Applies to:

This article describes features for experienced developers, or developers who are already familiar with Visual Studio. For a basic introduction to Visual Studio, see the Visual Studio IDE overview.

Modular installation

In Visual Studio's modular installer, you choose and install the workloads you want. Workloads are groups of features that programming languages or platforms need to work. This modular strategy helps keep the Visual Studio installation footprint smaller, so it installs and updates faster.

If you haven't already installed Visual Studio, go to the Visual Studio downloads page to install it for free.

To learn more about setting up Visual Studio on your system, see Install Visual Studio.

Create cloud-enabled Azure apps

Visual Studio has a suite of tools to easily create Microsoft Azure cloud-enabled applications. You can configure, build, debug, package, and deploy Azure apps and services directly from the Visual Studio integrated development environment (IDE). To get the Azure tools and project templates, select the Azure development workload when you install Visual Studio.

In Visual Studio, use Cloud Explorer to view and manage your Azure-based cloud resources. Cloud resources might include virtual machines (VMs), tables, and SQL databases. Cloud Explorer shows the Azure resources in all the accounts under the Azure subscription you're signed into. If an operation requires the Azure portal, Cloud Explorer has links to the place in the portal you need to go.

You can use Azure services for your apps by adding Connected Services, such as:

The available Connected Services depend on your project type. Add a service by right-clicking the project in Solution Explorer and choosing Add > Connected Service.

On the Connected Services screen, select the link or the plus sign to Add a service dependency. On the Add dependency screen, select the service you want to add, and follow the screens to connect to your Azure subscription and service.

For more information, see Move to the cloud With Visual Studio and Azure.

Create web apps

Visual Studio can help you write apps for the web. You can create web apps by using ASP.NET, Node.js, Python, JavaScript, and TypeScript. Visual Studio supports many web frameworks, such as Angular, jQuery, and Express.

ASP.NET Core and .NET Core run on Windows, Mac, and Linux operating systems. ASP.NET Core is a major update to MVC, WebAPI, and SignalR. ASP.NET Core is designed from the ground up to provide a lean and composable .NET stack for building modern cloud-based web apps and services.

For more information, see Modern web tooling.

Build cross-platform apps and games

Visual Studio can build apps and games for macOS, Linux, and Windows, and for Android, iOS, and other mobile devices. With Visual Studio, you can build:

Connect to databases

Server Explorer helps you browse and manage server instances and assets locally, remotely, and on Azure, Microsoft 365, Salesforce.com, and websites. To open Server Explorer, choose View > Server Explorer. For more information on using Server Explorer, see Add new connections.

SQL Server Object Explorer provides a view of your database objects, similar to SQL Server Management Studio. With SQL Server Object Explorer, you can do light-duty database administration and design work. Examples include editing table data, comparing schemas, and executing queries by using contextual menus.

To open SQL Server Object Explorer, select its icon at the top of the Server Explorer window, or select View > SQL Server Object Explorer from the Visual Studio top menu.

SQL Server Data Tools (SSDT) is a powerful development environment for SQL Server, Azure SQL Database, and Azure SQL Data Warehouse. With SSDT, you can build, debug, maintain, and refactor databases. You can work with a database project, or directly with a connected database instance on- or off-premises. To get SSDT, use the Visual Studio Installer to install the Data storage and processing workload.

Debug, test, and improve your code

When you write code, you should run it and test it for bugs and performance. With Visual Studio's debugging system, you can debug code running in your local project, on a remote device, or on a device emulator. Step through code one statement at a time, and inspect variables as you go. Or set breakpoints that are only hit when a specified condition is true. You can manage debug options in the code editor itself, so you don't have to leave your code.

For more information about debugging in Visual Studio, see First look at the debugger.

To improve app performance, check out the Visual Studio profiling feature.

Visual Studio offers testing options like unit testing, Live Unit Testing, IntelliTest, and load and performance testing. Visual Studio also has advanced code analysis capabilities to find design, security, and other flaws.

Deploy your finished application

Visual Studio has tools to deploy your app to users or customers through the Microsoft Store, a SharePoint site, or InstallShield or Windows Installer technologies. You can access all these options through the Visual Studio IDE. For more information, see Deploy applications, services, and components.

Manage your source code and collaborate with others

In Visual Studio, you can manage your source code in Git repos hosted by any provider, including GitHub. You can also browse for an Azure DevOps Server to connect to, too.

Next steps

• If Visual Studio doesn't have the exact functionality you need, you can add it. Personalize the IDE based on your workflow and style, add support for external tools that aren't integrated with Visual Studio, and modify existing functionality to increase your productivity. For the latest version of the Visual Studio Extensibility Tools (VS SDK), see Visual Studio SDK.

• You can use the .NET Compiler Platform Roslyn to write your own code analyzers and code generators. Find everything you need at Roslyn.

• Find existing extensions for Visual Studio created by Microsoft developers and the Visual Studio development community.

• To learn more about extending Visual Studio, see Extend Visual Studio IDE.

See also