Most people who write about Visual Studio Java don’t know what they’re talking about. They think it’s a tool like Visual Basic, where you draw windows on the screen and fill them with buttons and menus and such. But that’s not really how it works.
Instead, Visual Studio is an IDE, or Integrated Development Environment. It’s a canvas where you paint your app using code. In fact, in many ways it’s more like Photoshop than Word. If you’re used to Microsoft Office and the other PC productivity apps, that can be a bit of a shock at first.
One of the best ways to learn how to code apps is to break things into parts, or layers. For example, take Word: It has a tabbed ribbon at the top; beneath that is the main document window; beneath that is the status bar across the bottom of the screen; and so on. You could call these layers: The ribbon is one layer; the document window is another; and so on.
When you create your app in Visual Studio Java, you lay out your UI in much the same way. The first thing you do is create a blank form for your app to live in. You’ll need tools to design that form: The VS editor has tools
The latest version of Visual Studio, Microsoft’s integrated development environment, is now available on PC and Mac. The IDE comes with a number of new features, including IntelliSense for JavaScript and better search functionality.
Visual Studio includes tools for developing native apps for iOS, Android and Windows devices. It also supports cross-platform mobile development based on C
Visual Studio has a built-in app creation tool for creating Java applications. However, the tool is not created by Microsoft but instead by the community. The tool is developed alongside Visual Studio, and will be released with its major updates. To start creating Java applications using Visual Studio, you need to install the Java SE Development Kit (JDK). Install it on your machine and then run the following command:
After that, create a new project in Visual Studio and select Java as the language. Then select “Java Application” as the template:
This will create a basic app with some code already generated for you. The code looks like this:
Now that Visual Studio 2017 has been available for some months, we thought we would take this opportunity to let you know about a few features you may not have noticed yet. While most developers are familiar with Visual Studio’s core features, there are a number of useful but “hidden” features that can make your life easier. Here are ten of the best.
1) Auto-Bracket Completion
If you type an opening parenthesis or bracket and then hit enter, the matching closing bracket will automatically be inserted at the correct indentation level. If you need to cancel this behavior, simply press escape before hitting enter.
2) Comment Selection
You can easily comment out a chunk of code by selecting it with your mouse and then hitting Ctrl + K followed by Ctrl + C. To uncomment it again, just do the same thing again (this time with Ctrl + K followed by Ctrl + U).
3) Duplicate Line
Move your cursor to the line you want to duplicate and press Ctrl + D. This will insert a new line below your current line with the same text as in the original line.
4) Find All References
Place your cursor on any symbol in your code, right-click it and select “Find
By now, if you read my blog, you know that I am a big fan of Visual Studio. I have written blogs on how to get started with the free version of Visual Studio and have even shown how to create an application with it. This blog will be geared towards using Visual Studio for Java.
Java is not my forte, but it is not as hard to work with as many other languages out there. As we go through this blog, I will try to explain as much as possible about what we are doing and why we are doing it. However, if you want a more in-depth explanation of Java, this isn’t really the place for that.
One thing that I love about Visual Studio is that the basic features are available in all editions of the software and even their Express versions are feature rich; most Express versions don’t let you install extensions (plug-ins).
Installing VS 2017 Community Edition
The first thing we need to do is download and install Visual Studio 2017 Community Edition. For this blog, I am going to use version 15.7.0 (2017). You can download the latest version here: https://visualstudio.microsoft.com/downloads/.
Here are some tips on using Microsoft Visual Studio:
1. To add a comment, simply select the text and press Ctrl + K, Ctrl + C.
2. To uncomment it, press Ctrl + K, Ctrl + U.
3. If you need to create or edit an XML document, you can use the XML editor in Visual Studio. Simply take the following steps:
3a. Open the file in Visual Studio.
3b. Select XML from the Language drop-down list at the bottom of the editor window (or press Ctrl + Shift + L).
4. The Autos window lists all variables that were recently added or changed along with their values at different stages of execution. You can use this information for better understanding of variables’ values during debugging process or for quick comparison of two values – just place a breakpoint on a line after which one of these values is changed and then check it in Autos window when your code stops at this breakpoint.
5. The Locals window lists all variables that are currently in scope along with their values at different stages of execution. This is very useful when you debug your code because you can see all variables that are available in current scope without need to add them
Visual Studio Code is a free, open source, lightweight and powerful code editor for Windows, Mac and Linux. It has some cool features like IntelliSense, Go to Definition and Refactoring. However it lacks some features that most developers are used to like refactoring, testing and debugging. But there is a great community around Visual Studio Code and many extensions have been developed which add those additional features and much more.
In this blog post I’ll show you how to get started with Visual Studio Code using Java, Maven and JUnit 5. To follow along you need the following installed on your machine:
Java 8
Maven
Visual Studio Code