Visual Studio provides a variety of tools to help you when writing code. Because the functionality of these tools is closely tied to language syntax, each language service in Visual Studio provides its own capabilities.
Refactoring
Refactoring is the process of modifying code in order to make it easier to maintain, understand, and extend, but without changing its behavior. For more information, see the following pages:
- Refactoring (C#)
- Refactoring (Visual Basic)
- Writing and refactoring code (C++)
- Refactoring support for F# is provided in Visual F# Power Tools, a third-party Visual Studio extension.
Code Generation
Visual Studio can help generate portions of source code for you, letting you focus on the real work. For more information, see the following pages:
Quick Actions
Quick Actions let you easily refactor, generate, or otherwise modify code with a single action. These can be applied using the Light Bulb icon
, or pressing Ctrl + . when your cursor is on the appropriate line of code.

