Customer Reviews

Professional Application Lifecycle Management with Visual Studio 2010 (Wrox Programmer to Programmer)

5 star:		(10)
4 star:		(2)
3 star:		(2)
2 star:		(0)
1 star:		(0)

 

 

I got my copy of Pro ALM with VS2010 last week and really liked the book. Nice job.

VS2010/TFS2010 is a huge new release and it was nice to have a comprehensive overview of the product in one place rather than scattered across 20 different blogs. Even though I've been working with the betas of Visual Studio 2010 and Team Foundation Server 2010 for months, there were still things that I'd missed. Plus, for the pieces/features that I already knew about, it was nice to read someone else's take.

It reads easy and it will give you a fast, efficient brain-dump for getting going with 2010.

This is a pretty sweet book. There are a ton of features in Visual Studio 2010 and Team Foundation Server 2010. This book does a great job of covering all of them that are related to Application Lifecycle Management.

The book goes into enough detail to give you a good understanding of the feature they are covering. With the number of features covered to go into great detail would have made the book 5 times larger. I did not read any topic that did not have enough detail to give me a good understanding of the feature.

The book is broken down into 5 parts. Architect, Developer, Tester, Team Foundation Server, and Project/Process Management.

The book covers UML, using the Architecture Explorer, using Layer Diagrams, Unit Testing, Code Analysis and Code Metrics, Profi ling and Performance, Database Development/Testing/Deployment, IntelliTrace, Web Performance and Load Testing, Coded User Interface Testing, Lab Management, the Team Foundation Architecture, Version Control and Branching and Merging, Team Foundation Build, Reports, Portals, Dashboards, Workbooks, and Process Template Customizations. That is a ton of stuff!!!!

The authors have a good writing style that makes the book easy to read.

If you want to get to know Visual Studio 2010 and Team Foundation Server 2010, this is a great place to start!!!

I lead a small software development team that has significant experience using Visual Studio. This book has been really helpful for moving to VS 2010 because it covers the complete breadth of the lifecycle tools available in VS 2010, which has been perfect for us to quickly ramp up on the new features, as well as the new (and sometimes subtle) improvements to existing features. While there are high-level explanations of lifecycle concepts (use case diagramming, unit testing, etc), the book focuses much more on practical usage of the features of VS.

I would highly recommend this book to software professionals who plan to use VS 2010 at some point. Even if you're not working in a team--or if your team hasn't standardized on using these features--you'll produce better software and save a lot of time by understanding how to use these tools.

I would not recommend this book to people looking to learn about programming basics or for a deep theoretical discussion about the software lifecycle. This book is squarely focused on practical usage for software professionals.

And if you don't like it, I will send you a check for $40.*

(* - checks will not be honored)

First I want to say this isn't a bad book, and is nicely written with a decent flow. However, I don't believe I'm the audience it should be targeting. I picked this up since I became the "newly" appointed TFS2010 administrator to implement that throughout the development team. While this book does have a few chapters on it, it really wasn't much more than I can get by doing a Google search and reading free articles. That said, I know some people just like reading a book instead of surfing the web.

I have over 10 years experience in development, and have been working with VS since its 2002 release. While this book does hit the highlights, most of this was information that I have already experienced (Unit Testing, DB comparisons, architecture/UML drawings). Additionally, the authors focus on the VS2010 ULTIMATE edition. If yours is anything like my organization suffering a budget crunch, we don't have $10K per license to shell out for that. We're stuck with the more watered down versions of VS2010, so you can skip many of those chapters -- nearly a third of the book.

I would recommend this book to software developers in the .NET realm with 2 - 5 years of experience and to those who prefer reading an already laid out format decided by the authors. If this is your case, go for it. If you're like me then I'd take a pass and hit the Web.

Visual Studio 2010 is a huge release, and when you face more than 700 pages you probably get scared. This book is a nice ride over Microsoft ALM technologies, and even if it doesn't get too deep in some subjects, you still have a fine view about most of the tools in this version.
The book overall is an excellent general reference to Visual Studio 2010 ALM. I highly recommend this book as a general reference for Microsoft ALM technologies (from start to finish).

This book was very helpful for me. I had no idea how to use TFS or what it was before my project assignment. The book needed detailed information and instruction on how to use and setup TFS for project management and tracebility (requirements through production implementation). The information in the book along with the MSDN community provided useful information on creating and managing TFS work items to support the project.
This is a good resource if you do not know anything about
TFS.

Customers and clients have asked me for years, "Is there a book that covers all this?". To date, my response was, "Not really. Check out these blogs..." Well not anymore. This book offers a tremendous baseline of TFS/VS 2010 information. I buy it for all my clients-at the onset of any 2010 implementation. Sure, you'll need to consult other resources to drill deep on specific areas but this book delivers a well-thought and congruent overview.

I have to reflect some of the other reviewers.

This book is great at providing a breadth of coverage of a topic and platform (VS 2010 / TFS 2010) that is quite wide.

While it does dive a bit deeper into some of the topics, it does however provide a great presentation of the many capabilities of what makes up the platform.

Some of the sections go into areas that "I didn't know it could do that" on topics. Great for team leads to get their breadth of understanding of what teams can/should be doing with the tools at hand. And great to breaking the ice on finding areas that you can later concentrate on or dive deeper.

I just finished the book to implement VS/TFS 2010 and I can say that it is very well structure, and gives you the details where to start, what to focus on, it is very comprehensive.
If you know a little bit about VS/TFS 2010 you know that can be very complex if you don't have a good reference, well this is the one.
Good job and thanks for summarize !

The authors did a breadth approach to ALM with VS2010. The detail level is just about right, it covers practically every aspect of ALM with VS2010. While doing a depth approach would prohibitive in terms of size (and the time to read it :-)) a right balance has been achieved. It covers all aspects that are important giving you the why and the how not only allowing you to get you started but also allowing the reader to use the features effectively.

Well done and highly recommended