Best Kept Secrets in .NET [Paperback]

Deborah Kurata (Author)

Book Description

Publication Date: September 13, 2004

Author Deborah Kurata has spoken to .NET user groups all over America sharing her Best Kept Secrets in .NET, and she often hears experienced developers say, "I didn't know you could do that with .NET!" This book is a collection of Deborah’s insights into .NET secrets that can enhance your productivity and code quality.

For example, did you know that you could manage code snippets in Visual Studio .NET? Have you ever tried the incremental search feature? Have you discovered the ErrorProvider control? Do you know how to short-circuit operators, alias data types, build regular expressions, or improve your type casting? Have you seen all of the database tools available from Server Explorer? Did you know that you could manage your database scripts within Solution Explorer and include your stored procedures under source code control? Have you tried expanding the capabilities of a dataset using ExtendedProperties? With all of the talk about agile methodologies and extreme programming, have you tried to build a test harness with .NET? How about deprecating your methods? This book covers these secrets and much more!

Deborah also presents a collection of very valuable but lesser-known features of Visual Studio and the .NET Framework. She provides detailed information about how you can use each of these hidden treasures to improve the efficiency of your software development process and the quality of the resulting software. Whether you are an experienced developer or you're just getting started with .NET, this book will help you to be more productive, create better code, and produce superior software.

The primary goal of this book is to let you in on the secrets and hidden treasures that you can discover in Visual Studio and the .NET Framework. If, as you read through this book and say to yourself, "I didnt know I could do that with .NET!" then this book has met its objective.

Table of Contents

1. Hidden Treasures in Visual Studio
2. Doing Windows Forms
3. Code Tricks 
4. Much ADO
5. Defensive Development

Editorial Reviews

Review

I would really recommend that you have this near you when you code and slowly start using tip by tip… -- .NET From India blog, Anand M., September 8, 2004

About the Author

Deborah Kurata is a software developer and the bestselling author of Doing Objects with Visual Basic 6.0. She is among the highest-rated speakers at software development conferences worldwide and is the cofounder of InStep Technologies, a leading software consulting and training firm.

Product Details

• Paperback: 240 pages
• Publisher: Apress; 1 edition (September 13, 2004)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 1590594266
• ISBN-13: 978-1590594261
• Product Dimensions: 9.1 x 7.5 x 0.4 inches
• Shipping Weight: 15.5 ounces (View shipping rates and policies)
• Average Customer Review: 3.8 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (14 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #2,039,585 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

9 of 10 people found the following review helpful:

3.0 out of 5 stars No exactly a collection of .NET "secrets", but good writing, October 8, 2004

By 

Jason A. Salas (Dededo, Guam Guam) - See all my reviews
(REAL NAME)   

This review is from: Best Kept Secrets in .NET (Paperback)

Although I'm giving this book high marks for thoroughness of content, I did feel slightly dejected after expecting it, based on its title, to be a cornucopia of gems of little-known facts that .NET developers of varying levels could use. And while it certainly contains a lot of good remarks about how to work faster and/or more efficiently with have better performing code, it's not exactly a collection of "secrets".

I'm a somewhat experienced programmer, and a lot of what I read I found to be best practices that most introductory books on a variety of subjects will feature. The book's magic is that the tips are consolidated to within a single bound title, relieving the reader of needing to buy and read multiple titles to acquire such knowledge.

The book's finer points are evident in the many code samples being featured in both Visual Basic .NET and C#, and the book's succinct nature. Author Deborah Kurata doesn't spend hours poring over concepts; she just gets right to the point and lets you know how you can use a certain trick in your .NET programming. On that point, there's also a nice discussion of using regular expressions and operator overloading, and a good preview of refactoring in Visual Studio 2005 (at the time of this writing still in early beta).

However, I was disappointed in the fact that there wasn't a chapter on such secrets for web development with ASP.NET, and leans heavily towards those programming for Windows Forms (there are faint mentions of using web.config for web projects, but that's about it). This makes the book more applicable to desktop developers, and unfairly denies the browser crowd of using this book for their work.

Still, I came away with a couple of morsels that I'll take with me, such as the ability to use VB .NET's IsNumeric function in C# by referencing Microsoft.VisualBasic.dll. As with most APress titles, it's made the stand the test of time, with heavy paper and sturdy binding, so it's great as a desktop reference.

Overall it makes for a nice, quick read - priced pretty decently.

5 of 5 people found the following review helpful:

3.0 out of 5 stars Average Read for Beginers and Mid-level Dev, June 28, 2005

By 

Adnan Masood (Monrovia, CA, USA) - See all my reviews
(REAL NAME)   

This review is from: Best Kept Secrets in .NET (Paperback)

Like other reviewers have pointed out, "Best Kept Secrets in .NET" is a bit misleading title. From a developer's jargon, it would mean internals of assembly binding redirection or uncharted waters of machine.config etc however, this book is more about shortcuts and development techniques from an IDE perspective. "Literally" speaking, its a cross between Visual Studio Hacks and Code to Developer.

Apart from its name, it's generally a good book for beginers and average book for mid-level devs and skim through for seniors in case they won't know how to store code snippets in toolbox. I liked the improving unit testing and defensive development sections along with much ADO and hidden tricks in VS.NET. The Apress roadmap explains the intended audience and its a good match but generally, I'd recommend Coder to Developer for this particular genre of IDE/Process learning.

6 of 7 people found the following review helpful:

4.0 out of 5 stars Not quite secrets, but interesting anyway, October 12, 2004

By 

Jack D. Herrington "engineer and author" (Silicon Valley, CA) - See all my reviews
(VINE VOICE)    (REAL NAME)   

This review is from: Best Kept Secrets in .NET (Paperback)

There is a lot of interesting information in this book, that cuts across the range of .NET developers. It starts with tips about how to modify and use your Visual Studio environment, and ends with tips on the code in a data access layer. And at a mere two hundred pages the coverage is never in-depth. It's fragments of information, presented as secrets, from all over the .NET world.

The book is well written, and the graphics are used effectively. What is there is done well. But you need to make sure that there is enough that will be helpful to you in there before you buy. I definitely recommend reading the index and checking it out in person before you buy.