Customer Reviews

Visual Studio Hacks: Tips & Tools for Turbocharging the IDE

5 star:		(15)
4 star:		(4)
3 star:		(2)
2 star:		(1)
1 star:		(0)

 

 

Visual Studio Hacks offers the reader 100 tips related to the Microsoft Visual Studio integrated development environment (IDE). This book covers topics on versions of the software including Visual Studio 2005. Mr. Avery has selected a good compliment of topics. While not all of the hacks will be of interest to all developers, I think there is enough content in here for all levels of Visual Studio users. The typical items such as IDE setup, keyboard shortcuts, macros, and enhancing the tool are covered. However, this book also provides guidance on how to use and integrate the necessary tools to support a complete developer build cycle. Topics such as unit testing, debugging, profiling, code analysis, automating builds, and documenting source code are covered.

Visual Studio is one of the most productive development IDEs that I have worked with, in my experience. There are so many features that it takes a text like this to make you appreciate it. It is much more interesting to read a format such as this, instead of stepping through the product documentation, page by page, looking for nuggets of value.

I highly recommend this book. I believe that it is a must-have companion for Visual Studio. Anyone that is establishing their project's IDE guidelines for their development team would be well-served by the material covered in this book. What a way to impress your boss.

I would say this book is must-have for any die-hard .Net coder. Visual Studio.Net is a powerful IDE, and it is an expensive piece of software. This book helps you to squeeze every dollar out of your investment.

Among 100 hacks in the book, #64 about Reflector is my favorite. It sent me deep below the skin of .Net framework and get me an intimate look at .Net.

I would give this book a solid five stars if all the hacks download work as book said, but some(although very few) of hacks have bugs that need some help. For example, hack #97 Classify add-in, when I downloaded it from the book's site and installed it, I got a cryptic keybinding invalid warning. But it got fixed when I emailed the author about the problem. Thank you, James for your responsiveness.
Ying

If you want to remain a Junior Programmer forever, then don't get this book. But if you want to really excel as a VS 2005 programmer, then you need to get this book. There is no fluff in this book at all. It is densly packed with a ton of useful details on the VS 2005 IDE. Not only do you learn the ins and outs of the IDE but it also guides you through several very useful 3rd party add-ins to VS.

This book is a terrific read and a great reference. I can't say that about too many books.

If you spend a fair amount of time writing code in Visual Studio.NET, then Visual Studio Hacks will definitely improve your productivity in writing, debugging, and maintaining code. You'll find everything from using (and the practical uses of) built-in features (such as the Clipboard ring) to in-depth explanations of downloadable add-ins.

One thing I love about the book is how easy the hacks are to implement. For example I've always been annoyed at the output from the build results window but never took the time to even think about changing it. It seemed to be just easier to deal with it than fix it. After reading Hack #35 (Modify the Build Output and Navigate the Results), I'm confident I can take a few minutes to write a macro and customize it as needed.

Worried about difficulty in writing a macro? Hack #51 explains it step-by-step.

Although I don't consider myself to be an Über-user of VS.NET, I do use the development environment quite a bit and know my way around fairly well. That said, Visual Studio Hacks has definitely augmented my knowledge of not only what VS.NET does, but what *good* 3rd party add-ins are available. I've had too many bad experiences with *bad* add-ins killing half-a-day of work after requiring a reinstall of VS.NET. The ones listed here work well and are documented well.

By the way, I have to say that I liked Hack #7 (Make Pasting into Visual Studio Easier) the most. But then again, it's pretty hard *not* like a hack that you contributed to the book ;-).

I've been using Visual Studio .NET for a couple of years now, and while I've always managed to get the things done that I needed, it was not always done in the most efficient way. However, it was not until I read this book that I realized that.

The book is well organized, divided into 13 logical chapters, each focusing on a particular area. My favorite was "Customizing Visual Studio" which shows you many ways to setup VS to work best for you and your particular needs. The book also has tons of screenshots and very clear instructions, which I have found that many computer books lack these days, especially some of the other O'Reilly books. In addition, there are lots of code samples, where applicable.

Another great thing that book included was info about a bunch of VS add-ins. There are literally hundreds of them out there, so it was nice to have someone else spend all the time sorting through them and letting the reader know which ones are worth their time.

Overall, it's a great book for anybody who uses Visual Studio .NET

Avery demonstrates how Microsoft has refined Visual Studio into a very mature and integrated IDE. Though it must be said that this is best done with respect to Microsoft's languages of choice - C#, VB.NET and SQL Server. But if one of these is indeed your coding language, then the book offers a grab bag of tips.

The guts of this book are in one chapter - Debugging. Avery correctly points out that without debugging, Visual Studio is just a tarted up text editor clamped to a compiler. The 8 hacks in this chapter are thus pivotal in the book's potential utility to you. If you have ever used any debugger, then the chapter's concepts will be familiar. Like setting breakpoints at selected lines or functions. Or debugging a running process. Plus, Visual Studio has special means of debugging SQL Server. For some of you who have to maintain code for the latter, this ability can be Visual Studio's best feature.

Now if only Visual Studio were cheaper!

Not a bad book, some of the 'hacks' were straightforward that every true developer is familiar with. Others were nice to know. The best 'hacks' however were downlods from various sites....

The O'Reilly 'Hacks' books are great.

After you are familiar with using Visual Studio, you will find that periodically reading the 'Hacks' books will give you ideas about nifty little things that you can do. There are an even hundred hacks that cover all areas from setting up projects to extending and enhancing Visual Studio.

At its core, Visual Studio is just an editor, but it is quite a powerful editor with numerous features to increase productivity. There is a chapter and ten hacks on the editor section alone. And there are two additional chapters on Navigating and Customizing the editor to make it do things easier, faster or simply more suited to the way you choose to work.

Finally there is a discussion on various types of third party add-ins that can be used to further extend the feature set. It is a great relief to have someone else test the add-in before you spend time finding out that it doesn't do what's advertised.

Anyone who uses Visual Studio without reading this book periodically is not working as efficiently as he could. O'Reilly does professional quality books for professional programmers, this one is true to their heritage.

This book is a MUST HAVE for your collection. Even the most advanced user will be amazed at the abundance of information to tune and 'turbocharge' the Visual Studio IDE. James Avery did an excellent job of choosing and organizing the content - very highly recommended.

This is a great resource for making the Visual Studio IDE even better than it already is. Highly recommended.