Look and feel
Another powerful feature of Visual Studio's IDE is that you can customize the look and feel of the environment. You can change the theme, fonts, colors, menus, and toolbars to create an environment that works for you.
If you remember, when we launched Visual Studio Community for the first time, we customized our look and feel by selecting a theme.
Visual Studio gives you a lot of control over how the IDE looks and operates. You can see these customizable options under Tools > Options from the main menu.
In the video below, let's go through a number of customizations you may find useful.
Extensions library
Besides modifying the look of the IDE to your preference, you can also extend the power of Visual Studio with additional features. By launching the Extensions and Updates library, you can select from a variety of add-ons from the Visual Studio Marketplace. You can download/install other controls, templates, software development kits, and other tools to help you build your application.
The Visual Studio Marketplace is an online library that anyone can contribute. Members of the development community, like yourself, can build their own extensions and submit to the library.
Because of Windows 10 security, you need to launch Visual Studio in the administrator mode to make changes. Here's how:
Locate Visual Studio from the Start menu.
Right-click on Visual Studio.
Select More -> Run as administrator.
Select Yes when the security window appears.
In the video below, we'll launch Visual Studio Community in the administrator mode and install an extension.
NuGet Gallery
With the extensions library you were able to extend the power of Visual Studio. But, what about extensions for your application? The NuGet Gallery provides the ability to add functionality to your application with compiled code called packages.
The NuGet Gallery allows developers to share useful code they have created. Using packages gives you the ability to enhance your application and save time from writing additional code.
Packages are kept track of through maintaining the packages.config file in the root of your solution. This is how you are informed of package updates and how to restore them if they go missing from your application.
Let's recap!
You can customize the look and feel of Visual Studio.
You can extend functionality of Visual Studio by loading extensions.
You can enhance your application with packages of compiled code from the NuGet Gallery.
