How to Use VS for JavaScript Development

If you’re a JavaScript developer, you know that having a good code editor is essential. In this post, we’ll show you how to use Visual Studio for JavaScript development.

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Introduction

Visual Studio is a powerful JavaScript development environment. It provides many features that simplify the process of creating, testing, and deploying applications. In this tutorial, we will show you how to use Visual Studio for JavaScript development.

What is Visual Studio?

Microsoft Visual Studio is an integrated development environment (IDE) used to develop applications for the Windows platform. It supports multiple programming languages, including C++, Visual Basic, and C#.

In addition to traditional Windows GUI applications, Visual Studio can also be used to develop web applications, web services, and mobile apps.

Visual Studio provides a number of features that can simplify and streamline the software development process, making it an attractive option for many developers.

What is JavaScript?

JavaScript is a programming language that website creators can use to make their pages more interactive. For example, you can use JavaScript to create drop-down menus or to display the current date on a page.

JavaScript is what’s called a client-side scripting language. This means that the code is executed on your computer, not on the server. This makes it faster because the server doesn’t need to do anything.

Setting Up Visual Studio

Microsoft’s Visual Studio (VS) code is a free, open-source IDE that’s available on all major platforms. It’s a popular choice for JavaScript development, so let’s take a look at how to set it up.

Installing Visual Studio

In this section, we’ll cover the basics of setting up Visual Studio for JavaScript development. If you don’t have Visual Studio installed yet, go to the Visual Studio Downloads page and select your edition then follow the instructions on that page to install it.

When you run Visual Studio for the first time, you’ll be prompted to choose what workloads you want to install. You can either install everything or just select the individual components you want. For JavaScript development, you need at least the following components:
– ASP.NET and web development
– Node.js tools
– .NET Core cross-platform development (if you’re targeting .NET Core)

If you’ve already installed Visual Studio without these components and want to add them later, run the Visual Studio installer and modify your installation.

Creating a Project

JavaScript is a versatile language that can be used in a wide variety of applications. In order to get started developing in JavaScript, you will need to set up a development environment. This environment will include a text editor and a JavaScript engine.

There are many different text editors available, but we recommend using Visual Studio Code. This editor is free to download and has many features that are useful for JavaScript development, such as code completion and debugging.

Once you have installed Visual Studio Code, you will need to create a project. A project is simply a directory that contains all of the files associated with your application. To create a project, open Visual Studio Code and choose File > New Project from the menu.

Basic JavaScript Development in Visual Studio

Visual Studio is a popular Integrated Development Environment (IDE) used by many developers. While it is mostly used for developing Windows applications, it can also be used for developing web applications using languages like JavaScript, CSS, and HTML. In this article, we will take a look at how to use Visual Studio for basic JavaScript development.

Writing JavaScript Code

When you create a new HTML file in Visual Studio, the new file already contains the basic structure of an HTML page and some placeholder text. You can start writing your code right away in the element (highlighted in the screenshot below). When you’re ready to test your code, just press F5 or select Debug > Start Without Debugging from the menu. Visual Studio will launch your default web browser and load the page.

Debugging JavaScript Code

JavaScript is a scripting language that can be interpreted by Web browsers to create interactive Web sites. When you are creating something for the Web, such as a game or an online application, you have to test your code thoroughly to make sure there are no errors. Debugging is the process of finding and fixing errors in code.

The JavaScript debugger in Visual Studio can help you find errors in your code so that you can fix them. To use the debugger, you need to first set some breakpoints in your code. A breakpoint is a place where you want the debugger to stop so that you can examine the values of variables etc. To set a breakpoint, open the file containing your code and click on the line where you want to stop. Then click on the menu item Debug > Toggle Breakpoint or press F9. A red dot will appear next to the line to indicate that there is a breakpoint there:


When you run your code under the debugger, it will stop at the breakpoints so that you can examine what is happening inside your program. To start debugging, click on the menu item Debug > Start Debugging or press F5. Your code will now start running and will stop at each breakpoint in turn so that you can examine what is happening:


At each breakpoint, you can examine the values of variables etc by hovering over them with your mouse or by looking at the Locals pane:

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Advanced JavaScript Development in Visual Studio

Visual Studio offers many features to make JavaScript development easier, including code completion, a JavaScript console, and a variety of tools to help you debug your code. This section covers some of the advanced features that Visual Studio offers for JavaScript development.

Refactoring JavaScript Code

JavaScript is a language that is easy to pick up and start using, but it also has a lot of depth. As you start to write more complex code, you will want to pay attention to how you structure your code. In this section, we will look at how to refactor JavaScript code in Visual Studio.

One of the key things to remember when refactoring code is that you should not change the behavior of the code. The goal is to make the code easier to understand and maintain without changing what it does.

There are a few different ways that you can refactor code in Visual Studio:

-You can use the Extract Method refactoring tool to take a section of code and move it into a separate method. This can make your code more readable by breaking it up into smaller chunks.
-You can use the Rename refactoring tool to change the name of variables, functions, and methods. This can be helpful if you find that you are using names that are not descriptive enough.
-You can use the Extract Variable refactoring tool to take a section of code and assign it to a new variable. This can be helpful if you need to use the same section of code in multiple places.
-You can use the Extract Property refactoring tool to take a section of code and assign it to a new property. This can be helpful if you need to use the same section of code in multiple places.

Unit Testing JavaScript Code

Regardless of the size or complexity of your project, it is always a good idea to unit test your code. Unit testing helps ensure that your code is working as expected and that any changes you make do not break existing functionality. Visual Studio provides built-in support for JavaScript unit testing using the Jasmine framework. In this article, we will take a look at how to set up Jasmine unit tests in Visual Studio and run them as part of your continuous integration (CI) or continuous delivery (CD) pipeline.

Jasmine is a popular behavior-driven development (BDD) framework for JavaScript that has been around since 2010. It is relatively easy to use and has a large community of users. Jasmine is also one of the few BDD frameworks that can be used in both the browser and Node.js, which makes it a good choice for unit testing both front-end and back-end JavaScript code.

One of the advantages of using Jasmine for unit testing is that it does not require any setup or configuration. All you need to do is include the jasmine.js file in your HTML page and you are ready to start writing tests.

Conclusion

In this article, we have learned how to install and configure Visual Studio for JavaScript development. We have also learned how to create a basic JavaScript project, how to run and debug JavaScript code, and how to use some of the features of the Visual Studio IDE.

Next Steps

Now that you know the basics of using Visual Studio for JavaScript development, you’re ready to learn more about our tooling and how you can use it to build even better web applications. As you dive in, here are a few resources to keep in mind:

-Visual Studio 2017 Documentation: All the tips, tricks, and references you’ll need to get the most out of Visual Studio.
-Visual Studio Code Documentation: Everything you need to know about our free and lightweight code editor.
-Developer Community: Connect with other developers and get answers to your questions.

We can’t wait to see what you build!