Microsoft Visual Studio 2008 Programming

One Minute Bottom Line

Review

Since I've been using Visual Studio 2008 for a while now, I figured it was time for me to dig further into the great features that I know this powerful tool has to offer. In search of related resources, I came across this book on the web and decided to read it.

Much to my surprise, the book is not about what the title had led me to believe. The content doesn't relate to IDE usage alone, but is mainly a wide set of examples and development case studies that incorporate this famous tool. Inside the book's 19 chapters, you'll find a lot of common development scenarios, from ASP.NET apps to LINQ, ADO.NET, and multi-threading. One drawback for me in particular is that most of the source code is written in VB.NET, a language I'm not particularly used to reading.

The very well-written first chapter on "New Language Features" discusses C# enhancements and illustrates important concepts. In the second chapter, “New Development Tools”, authors Jamie Plenderleith and Steve Bunn talk about new and useful controls which we can find in the last .NET Framework release. The third chapter familiarizes us with WPF and XAML. The main intent here seems to be getting developers to a point where they are able to start a project in many areas of the .NET environment, assuming they know some fundamentals.

The LINQ chapters that follow are maybe the best part of this book. If you're not too fluent with this working manner, reading these dedicated pages will give you more confidence. Moving forward, tools like Debugger are discussed. Chapter 14 deals primarily wiht the use and construction of Debug Visualizer. Next, the focus leans toward ClickOnce and Windows Installer deployment. Some time is even spent discussing ASP.NET deployment. 

The chapter on security can't be treated as a bible, but at least reminds developers that security must be taken into account when publishing work on the web. The last chapter wraps up the book nicely with some emphasis on different Visual Studio flavors.

In short, I think this is a great read for newcomers. More information can be found on McGraw-Hill's webpage for the book.