What is Visual Studio and how can I use it?
This article is suitable for beginners in computer programming.
Visual Studio is an Integrated Development Environment.
Visual Studio is an Integrated Development Environment (IDE). It is used to provide an integrated environment for the users to develop computer programs. That is why it contains many features such as a Code editor, Build automation, Debugger, Graphic user interface (GUI), Version control, etc.
If you are looking for a platform to start developing a computer program with, Visual Studio will surely meet your needs.
What are the benefits of using Visual Studio for beginners?
1. Set up Build Environment Automation
The main purpose of Build Environment Automation is to let your computer learns about your program and decides how to do with it, which sometimes can be pretty complicated for beginners and those who are not familiar with computers. Therefore, the best part of using Visual Studio is that while you are creating a new project, Visual Studio will automatically set up all the settings for users and require no additional settings from you. What’s even better is that the automatic settings are set up to handle the majority of situations.
Just to prevent the beginners from quitting due to the difficulty setting process before even get to start a program.
2. Autocomplete
Sometimes it’s hard to remember all the direction codes in the beginning. For example, I want to insert a code to display texts on the screen.
I can type “pri…” and you can see “printf” is listed below before I finish typing. And the details are shown right next to the direction code, too.
Visual Studio can autocomplete your typing like mobile phone does — it will show the hint of your code when typing. You just need to use the arrow key and the tab key to choose the one you are inserting. The autocomplete function helps the beginners learners building the program in an easier way and helps the experts coding faster.
3. Find the errors in your coding in no time
Visual Studio will search for errors while you are coding and mark them with a red tilde. When you move your mouse close to it, it will show the reason for what goes wrong.
After finishing compiling and debugging the code, Visual Studio will show every error at the bottom of the window, it’ll also show the details of where exactly the error happened.
To begin learners, Visual Studio will help you find all kinds of errors, and give the resolution.
4. Too much to go on
There are plenty of advantages Visual Studio can provide like solution explorer, debugger step by step, rename function, format code, debugger multiple threads , live share,and version control.etc. These are not entirely for the beginners, but still the advantages for Visual Studio users.
What are the differences between “Visual Studio” and “Visual Studio Code”?
Visual Studio Code is a light yet strong editor, it can run under any desktop system like Windows、MacOS, and Linux.
Editor is different from IDE. The editor is more focused on “coding”. From this point of view, Visual Studio Code has less function than Visual Studio, such as debugging 、GUI development environment, etc.
The most basic version of Visual studio code is just like that with less functions. However, Visual Studio Code has a lot of extension tools. You can download them and install them by yourself to complete all functions.
On the other side, Visual Studio has already installed all of those functions mentioned above when you first install it. That’s why Visual Studio needs much larger computer capacity than Visual Studio Code.
In my opinion, Visual Studio Code and Visual Studio are not much different to the beginners.
The only difference is that you need more effort when you build the environment by using Visual Studio Code compare to using Visual Studio, but it is not too difficult to do that once you know how to build the environment. All functions that exist in Visual Studio are exist in Visual Studio Code, too. You don’t need to struggle with which one to choose.