Microsoft Visual Studio 2005 Unleashed

An excellent book. Lots of examples. Unfortunately, you will have to type in all the code examples yourself as the Sams Publishing web page does not have any downloads even though the back covers says that they are available.

This book did a great job of revealing the breadth of features available in the product. I think this book is quite useful to not only those that are just getting started but those that are seriously considering implementing VS/TFS in the organization. Even if you are an experienced user of Visual Studio you will certainly learn several new tricks. In fact, I reference this book with my clients who are interested in rolling out VS and TFS.

OK... I can see why Microsoft Visual Studio has been such a popular IDE for developers. Microsoft Visual Studio 2005 Unleashed from Lars Powers and Mike Snell does a nice job in explaining the value of the latest version of this classic, as well as being an in-depth guide to the feature set... Contents: Part 1 - An Introduction to Visual Studio 2005/.NET: A Quick Tour of Visual Studio 2005; A Quick Tour of the IDE; .NET Framework and Language Enhancements in 2005 Part 2 - The Visual Studio 2005 Environment - In-depth: Solutions and Projects; Browsers and Explorers; Introducing the Editors and Designers; Working with Visual Studio's Productivity Aids; Refactoring Code; Debugging with Visual Studio 2005; The Visual Studio Automation Object Model; Writing Macros, Add-ins, and Wizards; The .NET Community - Consuming and Creating Shared Code Part 3 - Visual Studio 2005 at Work: Creating ASP.NET User Interfaces; Building Windows Forms; Working with Databases; Web Services and Visual Studio Part 4 - Visual Studio Team System: Team Collaboration and Visual Studio Team System; Managing and Working with Team Projects; Source Control; Work Item Tracking; Modeling; Testing; Team Foundation Build; Index For someone like me who isn't a .NET developer, I found Part 1 very useful. The intro and tour gave me a great overview of what the IDE offers, and I could easily relate the different parts to the environment (Eclipse) I'm already familiar with. With that background, I could have easily taken Parts 2 and 3 and become productive in relatively short order. The authors maintain a good blend of text to screenshots to code, so I felt like I was getting a combination of reference and tutorial information in one volume. The argument could be made that all this information can be found in the help files, as is the case with most applications. But it's a lot easier to learn a tool like this (at least for me) when there's a structured guide that puts all the information in context. The Unleashed titles do just that, and this one is no exception...

This is a pretty impressive book, albeit a bit lengthier than it needed to be. There's tremendous coverage of everything, and I mean everything, in Visual Studio 2005. If you're new to VS 2005 then you'll find this a great guide to getting the most out of your environment. If you're fairly familiar with VS 2005 then you may still find a few goodies hidden away here too. The book spends too much time showing needless material like screenshots of each and every menu, and there's an irritating amount of useless code examples cluttering things up. I could have done without pages of solution file and auto-generated code listings, but this is an annoyance, not a fatal flaw. What you'll find in the book is a wealth of details on useful stuff like moving around your document with bookmarks, getting the most from VS2005's search capabilities, or how to best use features like the XML editor -- which is discussed in great depth with examples in the Data View and Schema editor. The book's smattered throughout with useful tips on avoiding gotchas, such as dealing with issues in the Refactoring's Promote command. The chapter on Refactoring, in particular, is a terrific walkthough with great examples. The chapter on Debugging is another good walkthrough, with a nice discussion of setting up for debugging a modestly complex scenario of a web application. The sections on Team System features are a nice introdocution to getting the most out of the three VSTS products (Architect, Developer, Tester). There's also solid coverage of working with issue tracking, VSTS's source control, and dealing with VSTS projects. The information here is from the basic useage viewpoint, so you'll need something like Guckenheimer's Software Engineering with Visual Studio Team System to get the most out of VSTS. Overall this is a solid book that's very useful introduction for novices and intermediate VS2005 users.

As the back cover of the book says, it's certainly a deep dive into VS2005. Microsoft is doing a very familiar reprise of its playbook. It has a development environment for programmers that it continues to richly enhance with many new features. Hundreds, as the book points out. (Just like Microsoft does with its Office suite.) Plus, Microsoft has managed to do this on a two year schedule, as VS2003 was the last release. Contrasts very favourably with the 5 years between its last operating system release and the upcoming Vista. Most of the new material in VS2005 seems to be bunched under the rubric of enhancing programming productivity. A nice one is automated testing. Given an existing code base, VS2005 can make unit tests and then run these! I am unsure to what extent it can fully make any type of unit test. But even with limitations, it saves you from having to manually write many low level tests. A good time saver. The authors point out that the automation conflicts with agile or test driven development approaches, which recommend that you write unit tests before writing actual application code. But pragmatically, not everybody uses those approaches. Perhaps most programmers do not. For them (you?), VS2005 offers this potential time saver. Other improvements include source code control. No longer might you need a third party control system. The new method can fit naturally into your VS usage. Along with this is the multi-programmer Team System. Enabling a collaborative project with less risk of tripping over each other's efforts.