Customer Reviews

Inside Microsoft Visual Studio .NET 2003 (Microsoft .Net Development)

5 star:		(2)
4 star:		(3)
3 star:		(1)
2 star:		(1)
1 star:		(1)

 

 

The title is inside visual studio. Inside meaning writing addons, macros, etc. It is not a book about how to use all of the features of the IDE. It quickly goes over the IDE interface but then quickly delves into the inner(inside) workings and api of the IDE environment. If you need to create Addons this is the book for you.

This book is gold if you want to write macros or add-ins for Microsoft Visual Studio .NET 2003. It starts with the basics for writing macros in Visual BASIC .NET and gradually leads to writing full-blown add-ins in C#.

My only complaint of this book is that it seems to lean rather heavily towards VB.NET and most of the examples are in VB.NET unless they absolutely have to be shown in C#. For example, when covering features that you really would only want to do in an add-in, the code snippets showing how to carryout certain tasks are shown in VB.NET. Converting from VB.NET to C# isn't too hard for a veteran programmer, but there are some pitfalls that can be time consuming.

But all in all, a great resource if you want to unleash the full power of Visual Studio via macros or add-ins.

The title of this book should have been ".NET Add-in's and Macros" instead of "Inside Visual Studio .NET". I wonder how many people have been misled thinking they were getting a book on how to use the IDE. In fact the first few chapters seem to indicate this confusingly!

This book does a good job of filling in the holes the online help leaves when it comes to the autmoation object model. I found ti very helpful. Much better than the other Micorsoft Press books I've purchased.

This book may have some content that is hard to find anywhere else but overall it was a big disappointment for me. I was looking for some real insight in how to write effective macros for manipulating text and this book only had 1 chapter on "the code model." The chapter was devoid of any decent example of using the TextSelection object.

I also didn't like the fact that the 3 author approach was so obvious. Some examples were in VB and some in C#. You would think they'd write the whole book in 1 language. I don't care which one but pick one. Since macros have to be written in VB.Net you'd think the whole book would have been in VB.Net.

This one missed the mark for me.

I thought this book had a well-balanced overview of .NET extensibility, and about Visual Studio .NET in general. This book would be useful for anyone that is thinking about developing macros, add-in, or using the VSIP interfaces (although it there is little detail about VSIP since VSIP interfaces were relatively inaccessible at the time this was written).

It would also be of interest to developers that use Visual Studio .NET, and are interested in digging a little deeper to understand more about how this tool works.

Title pretty much says it all. For each item covered the coverage is peurile and sparse. Each example tantalises you with lore, only to keep most of it hidden inside the authors' brains.

Admittedly attempting to document the dog's breakfast that is Visual Studio was always going to be an impossible task, but I think the authors have managed to fail to live up to even that low ceiling. DO NOT BUY THIS BOOK!

All the tools in just one place.