Microsoft Visual Studio 2019 is one of the best developer friendly Integrated Development Environment (IDE) a developer can have. The IDE has tons of features that help to ease the development process to a great extend. These features can be further customized or new features can be added using Visual Studio Extensions. In this blog post, we will look into the features that are supported by Visual Studio 2019 Community Edition.
Visual Studio can support multiple languages, frameworks and can be used to create applications ranging from mobile to cloud to IoT and many more and best of all the fully-featured community edition IDE can be downloaded for free.
Top Feature of Visual Studio 2019 Community Edition:
Free to Use
The Visual Studio 2019 Community Edition can be downloaded and used for free if the user can match any of the following criteria:
- Individual developer: If you are an individual developer and you work on your own.
- Students: If you are a student and you want to use the Visual Studio for learning purposes or for an academic research
- Open Source Contributor: If you are an open-source project contributor.
- Organization up to 5 users: If you are a part of a non-enterprise organization that has not more than 5 users.
- Enterprise Organization: An organization using less than 250 PCs or having annual revenue of $1 Million US Dollars or less.
Multiple Platforms Support
The developer can build applications that can target the following platforms like, Windows Desktop applications, Universal Windows Apps, Web Application (ASP.NET and ASP.NET Core), Office 365 applications, Azure applications, C++ Cross-Platform libraries development, Python, Node.js, .NET Core, Docket tools, etc and Microsoft keeps adding support for new platforms with new updates and releases.
IDE Features
- Peek Definition: The developer can use the Peek Definition command to view and edit the code without switching away from the code that he is currently writing.
- Refactoring: Refactoring of code like extracting methods, interface, reordering method parameters, removing parameters, encapsulating fields, renaming are supported.
- One-Click Web Deployment: This is one of the best features offered by the IDE, by clicking a Publish, the developer can deploy ASP.NET, ASP.NET Core, Python or Node.js projects to a local folder, Microsoft Azure, IIS, FTP location, etc.
- Multiple Frameworks Targetting: With the help of this feature, the developer can configure a single project to execute on multiple frameworks, like for example, the developer can target a project to execute on .NET Framework 4.6 and .NET Core 3.1 as well.
- Dependency Graphs and Code Maps: These types of files can be opened in read-only mode. The creation of these types of files is support by the higher version of Visual Studio.
Advance Debugging, Diagnostics and Testing
Code Metrics and Static Code Analysis: With the help of code metrics the developer can easily find various insights of the code they are developing. Using code metrics the developer can make various decisions like which types or method need to be reworked, which part of the code needs to be thoroughly tested. Visual studio calculate the following metrics like, Maintainability Index, Cyclomatic Complexity , Depth of Inheritance, Class Coupling, Lines of Executable code, etc.
Graphics Debugging: The IDE provides a set of tools that can help to record and then analyze rendering and performance problems in a Direct3D application.
Unit Testing: Visual Studio 2019 Community Edition supports unit testing of the code helping to ensure code quality, coverage and to find errors and faults in the application.
Performance and Diagnostics Hub: This is another great feature that the community edition provides, with the help of this feature the developer can profile the application and can find the various performance-related issue by analyzing CPU and memory usage of the application. This feature can also be used to analyze UI performance and accessibility events, resource consumption, GPU usage, etc, out of these features few of them are application-specific.
Collaboration Tools and Features
These are another great feature offered by Visual Studio 2019 Community Edition, the feature include Code Review, Live Share for real time collaborative development, PowerPoint Story boarding, as well as third-party development tool support.
All in all Visual Studio 2019 Community Edition is a great piece of development tool and I believe every developer must have it.
This concludes the post, I hope you find the post helpful. Thanks for visiting, Cheers!!!
Download Link
- Visual Studio 2019 Community Edition at Microsoft Site
- Additional Extensions and Plugins: Visual Studio Marketplace
- .NET Framework and .NET Core SDK: at Microsoft Site
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