Customer Reviews

Microsoft Visual Studio Tips

5 star:		(8)
4 star:		(2)
3 star:		(2)
2 star:		(1)
1 star:		(1)

 

 

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

Well, I've randomly skimmed through the book several times now, and have found exactly one tip that is not obvious. All the others so far are either well known or I have run across them before by just using Visual Studio. I guess the book would be valuable though for a completly novice VS user.

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

I'm through the first chapter and into the second; I've learned about 5-10 useful things that I've already put into practice at work.

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.

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.