Microsoft Visual Studio 2005 Unleashed (Paperback)

by Lars Powers (Author), Mike Snell (Author)

Editorial Reviews

Product Description

Microsoft Visual Studio 2005 Unleashed is a deep dive into the Visual Studio 2005 tool. Specifically, it will provide you with solid guidance and education that will allow you to squeeze the ultimate productivity and use out of the Visual Studio 2005 development environment. This book folds in real-world development experience with detailed information about the IDE to make you more productive and ease transition from other development environments (including prior versions of Visual Studio). This book will also help you increase team collaboration and project visibility with Visual Studio Team Systems and it will give you straight, to-the-point answers to common developer questions about the IDE.

 

Chapters include:

• Code Viewers, Explorers, and Browsers
• Refactoring Code 8
• Writing ASP .NET Applications
• Defining Standards and Practices
• Introduction to Visual Studio Team System
• Work Item Tracking 
• Unit and Load Testing

About the Author
Lars Powers (MCSD) has more than 14 years of experience in the software development focusing on designing and implementing solutions using Microsoft development tools. He was one of the original members of the MCSD certification program. He currently works as a Senior Consultant with Microsoft Corporation. Mike Snell (MCSD, PMP, Microsoft Regional Director) has 12 years of experience as a software architect and consultant. He has led a number of enterprise level projects and delivered training and mentoring to hundreds of developers. He is responsible for the Microsoft practice at CEI and ensures successful delivery of all .NET projects.

Product Details

• Paperback: 888 pages
• Publisher: Sams (August 28, 2006)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0672328194
• ISBN-13: 978-0672328190
• Product Dimensions: 9 x 7 x 2.1 inches
• Shipping Weight: 3 pounds (View shipping rates and policies)
• Average Customer Review: 3.6 out of 5 stars See all reviews (11 customer reviews)
• Amazon.com Sales Rank: #387,621 in Books (See Bestsellers in Books)

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• This item is part of The Unleashed Series.

Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

18 of 20 people found the following review helpful:

4.0 out of 5 stars Nice information, puts it all in context..., October 7, 2006

By	Thomas Duff "Duffbert" (Portland, OR United States) - See all my reviews (TOP 50 REVIEWER)    (REAL NAME)

OK... I can see why Microsoft Visual Studio has been such a popular IDE for developers. Microsoft Visual Studio 2005 Unleashed from Lars Powers and Mike Snell does a nice job in explaining the value of the latest version of this classic, as well as being an in-depth guide to the feature set...

Contents:
Part 1 - An Introduction to Visual Studio 2005/.NET: A Quick Tour of Visual Studio 2005; A Quick Tour of the IDE; .NET Framework and Language Enhancements in 2005
Part 2 - The Visual Studio 2005 Environment - In-depth: Solutions and Projects; Browsers and Explorers; Introducing the Editors and Designers; Working with Visual Studio's Productivity Aids; Refactoring Code; Debugging with Visual Studio 2005; The Visual Studio Automation Object Model; Writing Macros, Add-ins, and Wizards; The .NET Community - Consuming and Creating Shared Code
Part 3 - Visual Studio 2005 at Work: Creating ASP.NET User Interfaces; Building Windows Forms; Working with Databases; Web Services and Visual Studio
Part 4 - Visual Studio Team System: Team Collaboration and Visual Studio Team System; Managing and Working with Team Projects; Source Control; Work Item Tracking; Modeling; Testing; Team Foundation Build; Index

For someone like me who isn't a .NET developer, I found Part 1 very useful. The intro and tour gave me a great overview of what the IDE offers, and I could easily relate the different parts to the environment (Eclipse) I'm already familiar with. With that background, I could have easily taken Parts 2 and 3 and become productive in relatively short order. The authors maintain a good blend of text to screenshots to code, so I felt like I was getting a combination of reference and tutorial information in one volume. The argument could be made that all this information can be found in the help files, as is the case with most applications. But it's a lot easier to learn a tool like this (at least for me) when there's a structured guide that puts all the information in context. The Unleashed titles do just that, and this one is no exception...

20 of 23 people found the following review helpful:

4.0 out of 5 stars Good introduction for novices and intermediate VS2005 developers, September 23, 2006

By	James Holmes "Co-Author 'Windows Developer Po... (South Central Ohio) - See all my reviews (REAL NAME)

This is a pretty impressive book, albeit a bit lengthier than it needed to be. There's tremendous coverage of everything, and I mean everything, in Visual Studio 2005. If you're new to VS 2005 then you'll find this a great guide to getting the most out of your environment. If you're fairly familiar with VS 2005 then you may still find a few goodies hidden away here too.

The book spends too much time showing needless material like screenshots of each and every menu, and there's an irritating amount of useless code examples cluttering things up. I could have done without pages of solution file and auto-generated code listings, but this is an annoyance, not a fatal flaw.

What you'll find in the book is a wealth of details on useful stuff like moving around your document with bookmarks, getting the most from VS2005's search capabilities, or how to best use features like the XML editor -- which is discussed in great depth with examples in the Data View and Schema editor. The book's smattered throughout with useful tips on avoiding gotchas, such as dealing with issues in the Refactoring's Promote command.

The chapter on Refactoring, in particular, is a terrific walkthough with great examples. The chapter on Debugging is another good walkthrough, with a nice discussion of setting up for debugging a modestly complex scenario of a web application.

The sections on Team System features are a nice introdocution to getting the most out of the three VSTS products (Architect, Developer, Tester). There's also solid coverage of working with issue tracking, VSTS's source control, and dealing with VSTS projects. The information here is from the basic useage viewpoint, so you'll need something like Guckenheimer's Software Engineering with Visual Studio Team System to get the most out of VSTS.

Overall this is a solid book that's very useful introduction for novices and intermediate VS2005 users.

28 of 37 people found the following review helpful:

3.0 out of 5 stars A Good Start, but......., September 7, 2006

By	RonG (Chicago, Illinois) - See all my reviews

It's been a long wait to start seeing books about the Visual Studio 2005 environment. You might expect that after such a long wait, the books coming out would provide you with some valuable insights into the usage of VS2005. And, to some extent, this book does provide that. There is very good coverage of the basics....the structure of the VS IDE, how to create forms, how to create webservices, etc. But, after you go through all the work of designing and coding these neat programs, you of course want to be able to roll them out for use. At that point, this book seems to lose its mission, UNLESS you happen to be using the MS Team System, because after spending 16 chapters instructing the reader on how to use a variety of tools available in most versions of Visual Studio, the book starts to discuss production publishing and deployment, but ONLY if you are using MS Team System.

My advice to the reader would be that this will be a good book for someone new to the Visual Studio environment, who will be working in Team System, which is primarily aimed at the enterprise software developer. For the rest of us, I'd suggest something like the Wrox book "Professional Visual Studio 2005". Hopefully, there are more VS2005 books on the horizon as well.