Develop using Visual Studio

Develop using Visual Studio Background
6 min read

A popular alternative development environment to our preferred JetBrains Rider IDE is to use Visual Studio, the primary issue with this is that VS Code is a better IDE with richer support for JavaScript and npm projects whilst Visual Studio is a better IDE for C# Projects.

Essentially this is why we recommend Rider where it's best at both, where both C# and JS/TypeScript projects can be developed from within the same solution.

Developing with just VS Code​

If you prefer the dev UX of a lightweight text editor or your C# project isn't large, than VS Code on its own can provide a great development UX which is also what Vue recommends themselves, to be used together with the Volar extension.

VSCode's Integrated Terminal has great multi-terminal support you can toggle between the editor and terminal with Ctrl+ or open a new Terminal Window with Ctrl+Shift+` to run Tailwind with:

$ npm run ui:dev

Then in a new Terminal Window, start a new watched .NET App with:

$ dotnet watch

With both projects started you can open a browser tab running at https://localhost:5001 where it will automatically reload itself at every Ctrl+S save point.

Useful VS Code extensions​

We recommend these extensions below to enhance the development experience of this template:

Using Visual Studio​

As your C# project grows you'll want to consider running the back-end C# Solution with Visual Studio .NET with its much improved intelli-sense, navigation, tests runner & debug capabilities.

As we've never had a satisfactory experience trying develop npm or JS/TypeScript projects with VS.NET, we'd recommend only using VS.NET for C# and Razor and continuing to use VSCode for everything else.

If you'd prefer to use Visual Studio for front-end development we recommend moving all JS to external files for a better Dev UX, e.g:

<script type="module" src="/Pages/SignIn.mjs"></script>

Deploying to Production​

This template also includes the necessary GitHub Actions to deploy this Apps production static assets to GitHub Pages CDN, for more info, checkout GitHub Actions Deployments.

Get Started​

If you're new to Vue 3 a good place to start is Vue 3 Composition API.