Customer Reviews

Microsoft Visual Studio 2008 Unleashed

5 star:		(3)
4 star:		(3)
3 star:		(0)
2 star:		(0)
1 star:		(2)

 

 

An excellent primer to the VS2008 IDE. Covers a vast area with a fair amount of detail, and provides excellent quality screenshots throughout. Highly recommended if you want to get up to speed with this huge IDE.

Not sure what the previous reviewer's issue was with the book, as he provided no details to justify his one star review.

Gimme a break... Not sure what the 1 star rating is all about, but I found this book to be very helpful in getting me up and running in the Visual Studio 2008 environment. This book has a lot of information and is a great resource, so if you need an excellent reference manual this is it.

I highly recommend this book for those who feel overwhelmed with Visual Studio 2008.

When used as a resource this is a fine book. Do not think it is a good step-by-step manual however. Many assumptions are made as to your familiarity with the sections of Visual Studio. The need for a CD with examples is apparent after working with this book.

To start with, I think there are a myriad of sources with bits and pieces of the information you need about Visual Studio 2008 and its features, and I feel Mike and Lars have done a commendable job in pulling them all together in one comprehensible written book. Every chapter of this book is well documented with clear, incisive examples and screenshots and overall this book takes you leaps and bounds into an advanced level of knowledge.

This book has helped my overall productivity a great deal. Kudos to Mike and Lars for producing such a great resource for programmers like me. And last but not the least this book quite simply in my humble opinion, is a "must have" for anybody who wants to use Visual Studio more effectively.

Visual Studio Unleashed 2008 is such a great book I will always keep it close to my working table whenever I am using Visual Studio 2008. It is pretty huge, but has plenty of useful information that may save you time when dealing with the increasingly complex Visual Studio IDE.

I've found this book to be very well done. While others have said that its not very detailed, the level of details was perfect for what I was looking for. I liked the overview of WPF and the example on chapter 16 was a very good introduction to WPF. It gave me a good understanding of the basics and I now feel more confident to delve deeper. I've also looked at the section on Team System and found it to be perfect for what I was looking for.

The reason for the 4 stars instead of 5 is that there were a number of errors in the source code. I've only looked at the source code in chapter 16, but there were a number of errors there. For example, they declare a variable "private string _path", but later on in the source code they refer to it as "path" (without the underscore). Ok, that is something I could figure out.

In the buttonBlur_Click event they call a function BlurBitmapEffect, but they don't implement this function! Another issue I had, and this might be just because I'm new to WPF, but I followed the examples starting with the first one on Chapter 16. Well, when I got to the ImageViewer example, all of a sudden the namespace changed, and it wasn't mentioned. So I kept getting errors like InitializeComponent not found. It turns out that if you change the namespace you need to also changed it in the bin\obj\debug\Window1.g.cs file (make sure you have show all files set). Not sure if this is something the authors should have mentioned, but wouldn't it be logical for someone to follow examples from start to finish without creating new solutions/projects for each one?

I've only listed three such issues, but there were a number of small issues like this. I finally just downloaded the source code from their website and everything there seemed to work. The website is -[...] and then click on the downloads page. If the above link doesn't work you can get to it via [...]and then click on the "More Information" link.

The index is very poor making it terrible to use or go straight for the information you need. When you do find the information on the topic you want it only talks about it. It doesn't tell how to do, create, or code anything. I am a programmer I need to know the "how" and just be told what it will do. I already know "what" I need to do. I need to know "how". This book won't tell you that.

RUBBISH. This book is rubbish ! It is probably the worst book I ever spent good money on in my life. There are a lot of words and many pages but nearly ZERO useful information. The authors make a fine art of talking alot about nothing. USELESS RUBBISH !

If you want information about 'Visual Studio 2008' load the package and use the 'Help' button. The information under the 'Help' button is infinitely more useful than this book.

I fear the 'garbage syndrome' that has become so prevalent in all consumer products has worked its way into the technical book field. Save your money and frustration don't waste either on this piece of rubbish.