Source control and work item tracking are enterprise-level features for managing large-scale collaborative software development projects, providing means to check in/out code, open and close bugs, and so on.Integrated build support is tightly integrated with project management features and allows immediate invocation of the build process to produce executable code and feed build errors and warnings back to the IDE.Project management keeps track of the various items that are part of a software development project, including source files, designer-generated files, project-level settings, and so on.Debugging facilities are the bread and butter for every developer to tame the complexities of analyzing code behavior and (hopefully not too many) bugs by stepping through code and analyzing the state of execution.

Typical examples include GUI design, web page layout, object/relational mappings, workflow diagrams, and so on. Designers come into play when code is to be generated for common tasks that benefit from a visual development approach.In the spirit of UML, class designers and architecture explorers are available right inside the tool. Visualization of project structures bridges the gap between architecture, design, and implementation of software.Navigating between source files is just the tip of the iceberg, with the editor providing means to navigate to specific types and members. Exploring code is what developers do most of their time in the editors.Refactoring support is one of the powerful tools that makes manipulating code easier and allows for the restructuring of existing code with just a few clicks in a (mostly) risk-free manner.Source code editing with built-in language support for various languages such as C#, Visual Basic, F# and C++, including things such as syntax coloring, IntelliSense autocompletion, and so on.Although it originally stood for the combination of source code editing and debugging support, today's IDE has capabilities that stretch a whole range of features such as One core reason for this is its integrated development environment (IDE) concept, which is really an expansive term with an overloaded meaning today. Since the very beginning of software development on the Microsoft platform, Visual Studio has been an invaluable tool to simplify everyday development tasks significantly.

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