Microsoft Visual Studio Tips [Paperback]

Sara Ford (Author)

Book Description

Publication Date: October 27, 2008 | ISBN-10: 0735626405 | ISBN-13: 978-0735626409 | Edition: 1

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

Editorial Reviews

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; 1 edition (October 27, 2008)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0735626405
• ISBN-13: 978-0735626409
• Product Dimensions: 0.8 x 7.2 x 8.9 inches
• Shipping Weight: 1.1 pounds (View shipping rates and policies)
• Average Customer Review: 4.1 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (15 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #872,716 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

More About the Author

Sara Ford worked at Microsoft for 9 years, where she worked as a developer on the Visual Studio team and was responsible for CodePlex.com, Microsoft's open source project hosting site. She ran the popular Visual Studio Tip of the Day series on her Microsoft blog.

Sara donated all her author royalties to start a scholarship fund designed for Hurricane Katrina survivors of her hometown Waveland, Miss. to attend the Mississippi Gulf Coast Community College.

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

5 of 5 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

Format:Paperback

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.

10 of 13 people found the following review helpful

2.0 out of 5 stars A lot of folksy blog for very little useful content April 21, 2009

By PrettyField

Format:Paperback|Amazon Verified Purchase

I thought this book was really going to help me learn important tricks to make Visual Studio use more productive, but I was pretty disappointed. There are a lot of tips, for sure, mostly having to do with arcane keyboard shortcuts. There were several which were absolute gold, but most of them did little for me, and the truly great tips were so buried in the clutter, they were hard to find. Perhaps a tip rating system (5 star tips vs 1 star tips) might have helped. The worst thing was that there were these constant blog-like entries which provided no content whatsoever; I especially grew to dislike the "I'm not sure what good this tip is, but you can also do this..." gibberish. I realize that's because the book contents were taken from the author's blog, but it makes for a really poor book-reading experience. It seemed hastily put-together and poorly edited. I wasn't looking for a terse academic treatise, but I really disliked the blog delivery. It was all "ah, heck" folksy attempt with very little content per page.

90% of all Microsoft Press books are really good; I was disappointed to find that this book is clearly in the 10% which are not. I strongly urge Microsoft not to permit this kind of watered-down content in future MP books, and I urge readers to look for something better.

5 of 6 people found the following review helpful

4.0 out of 5 stars Recommended November 30, 2008

By Uncaged

Format:Paperback

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.

1 of 1 people found the following review helpful

5.0 out of 5 stars Who knew the IDE was so feature rich April 12, 2009

By Ross Mason

Format:Paperback

Scott Mitchell of MSDN turned me on to this book, Visual Studio Tips. It came in this morning and I have spent the rest of the day going through it. It is outstanding. Who knew the IDE was so feature rich. Most of the code I write today is in Visual studio. The tips in Sara's book have opened up a whole new world of efficiency for me.
My Top Five Tips from Sara Ford
5) Tip 3.1 Incremental searches
4) Tip 2.29 Bookmark all Quick Find results, However I wish it would bookmark all my quick replacements so I could review them to make sure I didn't replace something wrong.
3) Tip 4.7 Ctrl-Tab through open files
2) Tip 4.3/4.4 copy a files full path and open the explore to the active file folder
1) Tip 2.40 Tab Tab to insert Snippets
I recommend this book to anyone who codes in the Visual Studio.

2 of 3 people found the following review helpful

5.0 out of 5 stars The best book to unlock the secrets of Visual Studio IDE October 24, 2008

By Christopher Woodruff

Format:Paperback|Amazon Verified Purchase

I have been following Sara's blog [...] for a long time and recently discovered that she was making book that covered all the things that most developers do not know or have forgotten when using the Visual Studio 2005/2008 IDE. I pre-ordered the book and I am amazed by not only the content but also by the organization of the book. The author has done a great job of organizing the Visual Studio tips so that the reader can find the area and then either read all the tips or browse through the table of contents to find what they are looking for. I spent an hour last night looking at tips that I know will make me more productive when developing software with Visual Studio.

5.0 out of 5 stars Great Book June 5, 2013

By Susan Grafton

Format:Paperback|Amazon Verified Purchase

the tips are extremely helpful. Easy to read! With practice the tips become second nature, replacing time consuming bad habits.

5.0 out of 5 stars Useful for the advanced Developer! September 3, 2009

By Thorsten Claus

Format:Paperback

I read Sara's Blog for a long time now. There I saw that she has written a book with all her most userful tip I bought it.
The book covers useful tips, Keycodes and many shortcuts for the dayly developer which make the code-handling more efficent.

VB.NET or C# doesnt matter, most tips are for booth Coders.

For the daily professional developer the book is a must-have.

regards from Germany
Thorsten

4.0 out of 5 stars Great Time Saving Tips May 10, 2009

By John Grove VINE™ VOICE

Format:Paperback

This books rocks but it is very small. I saw it at Borders running for a little bit more then Amazon. I sat and almost read the whole thing while I was at Borders. Great book, but it really should be a little bit less.