Pro Visual Studio .NET (Expert's Voice)

Rating:
Summary: Pace Eclipse
Review: This book is a collaborative effort by many authors, to show you how to use the latest VS.NET. You can see an impressive and well integrated set of capabilities and tools for a complete development environment in .NET. Microsoft has put in a ton of sweat to refine its earlier .NET offerings into this latest version.

There is a heavy usage of XML as the preferred way to store relational data. Good. But for some of you, the screen captures of the IDE will be the most compelling part of the text. See how to quickly arrange projects and bring up a panoply of tools. A tremendous amount, but arranged to be as intuitive as possible, hopefully. The sheer mass of functionality within the IDE means that the resultant default arrangement must have been non-trivial to arrive at.

What struck me most about all this was how it seemed to echo the Eclipse IDE for Java programmers. This book is coy. Scarcely a reference to Java, and none at all to Eclipse. Yet I think both IDEs are acting as a goad to each other. A race to provide better and better tools. Ultimately, that benefits you as a programmer, whichever languages you adopt.

Rating:
Summary: In-depth on the end-user aspects of Visual Studio
Review: This is the flip side to the API book, the IDE book. Dave Thomas talked about knowing your editor and your IDE. This book plows into making the best use of Visual Studio, including extending it. If you are going to be using Visual Studio for eight hours a day you will want to have a look at this book to see how to make better use of their IDE and particularly how to extend it. If you can write a macro that saves you ten minutes a day, it will save an hour a week and a week a year.