Microsoft Visual Studio Tips (Paperback)

by Sara Ford (Author)

Editorial Reviews

Product Description
Just as a race car team analyzes every aspect of car and driver data to optimize endurance and speed imagine your potential if you could optimize every aspect of daily coding activities with Visual Studio! The author a member of the Visual Studio team for five years has identified 251 tips to help you do just that. In her own words, There was much about Visual Studio I didn t know...until I had to learn and test it ALL. What I discovered is that although Visual Studio has a lot of options, it isn t endless and it doesn t have to be overwhelming. In fact, Visual Studio can be mastered and in this book I show you how. Performance enhancements begin in the editor, and include every other feature you touch when coding in the IDE. This book collects, illustrates, and categorizes the tips and tweaks you can apply right now to help optimize your daily routine and productivity

Key Book Benefits

Delivers hundreds of proven tweaks for the Visual Studio IDE, all designed to help maximize developers time Provides practical insights into how and why features work as they do, and how to change them to suit individual needs Delves into the Visual Studio editor, searching, navigation, layout, and other capabilities 100% of the author s royalties will be donated to relief efforts in areas devastated by Hurricane Katrina

About the Author
Sara Ford worked as a Software Design Engineer in Testing on the Visual Studio Core Team for five years and across three product cycles. She has had the unusual experience of learning and testing every feature of the Visual Studio IDE. In 2007, Sara began a daily blog, which fast became the most-frequented Microsoft Web site, Visual Studio Tip of the Day .

Product Details

• Paperback: 272 pages
• Publisher: Microsoft Press (October 27, 2008)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0735626405
• ISBN-13: 978-0735626409
• Product Dimensions: 8.9 x 7.3 x 1 inches
• Shipping Weight: 1.1 pounds (View shipping rates and policies)
• Average Customer Review: 4.2 out of 5 stars See all reviews (11 customer reviews)
• Amazon.com Sales Rank: #84,396 in Books (See Bestsellers in Books)

Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

4 of 4 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Awesome Book on the Visual Studio IDE, October 28, 2008

By	R. Tipton - See all my reviews (REAL NAME)

I pre-ordered the this book back in August and I have to say this is the best book on the Visual Studio IDE that I have ever run across. It is a great collection of tips taken from Sara Ford's ever-popular Visual Studio Tip of the Day. I really like the "Sara Aside" sections where extra insight is given about the tip.

There are tips for (but not limited to) the following -

* Dealing with the editor
* Searching files
* Development environment
* Debugging
* Design time tools

If you have to spend any amount of time in Visual Studio then this book is definitely worth the money as I will be referring back to it time and time again. I am also recommending it at my office. Especially for beginners to .NET.

4 of 5 people found the following review helpful:

4.0 out of 5 stars Recommended, November 30, 2008

By	Uncaged - See all my reviews

Valuable information for all developers. The book is pretty well organized, and I like all the screen shots, although in some shots of mouse hovers, I would have preferred if a transparent arrow cursor image had been pasted on the screen shot for clarity.

Personally, I could have done without all of the superfluous anecdotes about the author's experiences as a tester, but I suppose that some would prefer the added levity and blog-like delivery.

2 of 3 people found the following review helpful:

3.0 out of 5 stars not much help for an object-oriented scavenger, March 26, 2009

By	arzewski (pittsburgh, pa United States) - See all my reviews

Everytime there is a new IDE (Integrated Development Environment), immediately there will be some book or quick tutorial in customizing keyboard shortcuts in accomplishing some thing that would normally require three actions, either by menu item selection of keystrokes. This book definitely shows you how. But there are some disappointments: for example, in the text replace section, it correctly shows how to replace code with other code, but it is entirely from a mindset of a writer on a word processor and not of a developer. For example, if I want to rename a class method such as read() to triggerRead(), i must then replace all the invokations to the method read in instantiated objects of that class. If I do a global text/replace, I will end up replacing read() that belong to other classes, and that is not what I want to do. The refactoring tools do that, and didn't see this approach explained in the book. Similarly, in the section about the Object Browser, it would be great to see a listing of all the code occurrences in which a specific method is invoked (in Smalltalk environment, that would be "show me all the senders of this message"), and also a listing of all the implementers of a method. In the latter case, if I suspect there may be more than one class that has implemented the method read(), I would like to see a listing of such classes. Unfortunately this book doesn't go that far.