Coding Faster: Getting More Productive with Microsoft® Visual Studio®: Covers Microsoft® Visual Studio® 2005, 2008, and 2010 [Paperback]

Zain Naboulsi (Author), Sara Ford (Author)

Book Description

Publication Date: August 31, 2011

Expert advice to help you work smarter and increase your productivity with Visual Studio.

Take a detailed look into Visual Studio—and learn practical techniques to help you work more efficiently. This fully revised and expanded version of Visual Studio Tips: 251 Ways to Improve Your Productivity includes a comprehensive collection of tips and shortcuts for working with the code editor, visual designers, searches, debugger, and other features in Visual Studio 2005, 2008, and 2010. You'll gain valuable insights for using this IDE—no matter what your experience level.

Discover how to:

• Change development settings and keyboard mappings to optimize your efficiency
• Save time initiating a new project by creating custom templates
• Uncover secrets for working with the toolbox, commands, and window layouts
• Work with files in more practical ways, such as using the File Tab Channel
• Use the Editor more effectively with tips on selecting and manipulating code
• Apply techniques to help reduce the time you spend debugging code
• Create Visual Studio extensions to increase your development productivity

Editorial Reviews

About the Author

Zain Naboulsi is a Senior Developer Evangelist at Microsoft®.  For over 15 years Zain has been working with the latest Microsoft technologies. He's been a consultant and trainer since 1995. He currently runs the Visual Studio Tips and Tricks blog. Also, he created Online Community Evangelism; which is an effort to build communities in virtual places like LinkedIn, Facebook, and elsewhere. He is not only a proponent of the community aspect of online environments but also is a supporter of the myriad business applications that these new mediums offer.

Zain's efforts have been featured by eWeek, Redmond Developer News, and many others. He has been interviewed by Forrester Research, Gartner, and the Science Channel for his work. He is a frequent speaker at events in LinkedIn, Facebook, and other online venues. Zain also lectures world-wide on a variety of developer topics.

Sara Ford is the Senior Product and Community Manager at Black Duck Software for Ohloh.net, the largest public destination for finding and evaluating open source software. Prior to Black Duck, she worked for nine years at Microsoft Corp., where she was responsible for CodePlex.com, the open source project hosting site for Microsoft. She started her career as a software tester on Visual Studio, a software development environment, where she drove the effort to make it possible for developers who are blind or have low-vision be able to write software applications.

Sara is the author of the award-winning Visual Studio Tips: 251 Ways to Improve Your Productivity, published by Microsoft Press, where she donates all her author royalties to a scholarship fund designed for residents of her hometown Waveland, Miss. to attend the Mississippi Gulf Coast Community College.

Product Details

• Paperback: 480 pages
• Publisher: Microsoft Press; 1 edition (August 31, 2011)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0735649928
• ISBN-13: 978-0735649927
• Product Dimensions: 7.4 x 1.3 x 9 inches
• Shipping Weight: 1.7 pounds (View shipping rates and policies)
• Average Customer Review: 4.1 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (14 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #100,292 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)
  • #12 in Books > Computers & Technology > Software > Business > Utilities
  • #40 in Books > Computers & Technology > Microsoft > Development > SQL Server
  • #46 in Books > Computers & Technology > Microsoft > Development > Visual Basic

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

6 of 6 people found the following review helpful

5.0 out of 5 stars The reference manual for using Visual Studio October 6, 2011

By Philip Wheat

Format:Paperback

(Full Disclosure - I work with Zain)

Remember when development environments came in boxes that shipped around and you got a set of books inside with the disks? This is one of those books. This is the reference book that you go to for that hotkey to make everything easier. Or to find the fastest way to move around the codebase so you don't lose your train of thought. And it is the ONLY place I've seen where I can find out just what it means when I run Visual Studio the first time and it asks me for my defaults - what's the difference between a C# developer and a default developer? Zain dug out the details and put them in the book so I know what my choice means.

This is NOT a tutorial book. This IS a reference manual on all the ins and outs and details of the development environment itself that can help make the difference between wandering lost in the menus and having the code flow from your fingertips. It's a book you definately want on your shelf if you code every day (and even if you don't do it EVERY day.)

4 of 4 people found the following review helpful

4.0 out of 5 stars Great for beginners... September 5, 2011

By T. Anderson TOP 1000 REVIEWERVINE™ VOICE

Format:Paperback|Amazon Verified Purchase

I had a few second thoughts about buying this book knowing that all the content was available on line. After thinking about it for a while I decided to get it. In order to see what is available on line I need to search for it and not knowing what to search for won't get me to the content anytime soon.

Although I believe this book will definitely get the beginner up to speed quickly, advanced users will not benefit as much. I was the subject matter expert for the Microsoft Visual Studio 2010 Learning Snacks so I had to learn the IDE extensively. I therefore did not learn very much from the material. I can say however, that this book's material is perfect for those who don't have the time to play with VS to learn all the little productivity tips this book offers.

The book has a 254 page appendix available for download. Although this is great additional material, I would have preferred it be included in the book. I found the little key at the beginning of each tip a waste of paper and would have rather seen this content included.

I really feel that beginners should definitely read this book, mid-level developers will learn plenty of new things, but those who live and breathe Visual Studio won't learn as much.

The content covers everything I can think of that a developer should know who makes their living in Visual Studio.

2 of 2 people found the following review helpful

4.0 out of 5 stars Good but not great September 21, 2011

By itsmatt

Format:Paperback

I definitely learned some things from Coding Faster and I thought the layout of the book was good. I received a review copy of this for O'Reilly's blogger program.

I wish this book spent a little time with unit testing and/or external application setup to support it in the Express SKUs. In my book unit testing is a huge productivity win, but I get that they mostly were focusing on how to do X or Y and not how to be a better programmer by adopting unit testing. Still, its in the Profession SKU and not mentioned.

A great tip that I didn't know - the CTRL key will make intellisense popups transparent - no need to ESCape the popup to see what's under it. Very cool.

If you're a seasoned pro, I'd skip the book but if you're learning, it's pretty good.