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Minibook
Visual Studio .NET Tips and Tricks
Posted by Minh T. Nguyen on Jun 08, 2006 01:00 AM
Visual Studio .NET Tips and Tricks explains how to use VS.NET efficiently. Organized into short and easy-to-grasp sections, and containing tips and tricks on everything from editing and compiling to debugging and navigating within the VS.NET IDE, this book is a must-read for all .NET developers, regardless of expertise and whether they program in C#, VB.NET, or any other .NET language. This book covers the Visual Studio .NET 2002, 2003, and 2005 Beta 1 releases.
In this book you'll find the following:
- More than 120 tips for editing and writing your code, navigating within the IDE, and compiling, debugging, and deploying your application
- Section dedicated to VS.NET 2005
- Keyboard shortcuts for the majority of tips
- More than 90 figures and screenshots
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Table of Contents
Chapter 1: Editing Code
Programmers perform a variety of daily tasks: We attend team meetings, design and test our programs, write documentation, and perform code reviews. But writing code is one task that awaits every programmer. If you love to code, Microsoft Visual Studio .NET is perfect for you because it offers many ways to help you write and edit code. This chapter covers some of the tips and tricks you can use to write and navigate through your code much more quickly than before. From code comments and code navigation to generating code snippets and performing complex find-and-replace searches, this chapter covers all you need to know while you write code.
Chapter 2: Exploring the IDE
Visual Studio .NET is an extremely customizable IDE that is loaded with features. No screen real estate is wasted to give you quick access to commonly used commands and activities and to control and modify your project and solutions. The tips in this chapter cover everything from the Solution Explorer to window positioning, from managing macros and modifying menu items to other lesser-known tricks that are highly useful in navigating inside the IDE.
Chapter 3: Compiling, Debugging, and Deploying
Not only is VS.NET a great editor, it is also a great compiler, debugger, and profiler. There are many hooks into VS.NET that allow you to control your compilation procedure. The following are absolutely essential in trying to locate and fix a bug: analyzing your code, attaching to running processes that you want to debug, and changing code and variables at runtime. These are just a few topics I cover in this chapter that you need to know when it comes to compiling and debugging your programs.
Chapter 4: Using VS.NET 2005
VS.NET 2005 is an enormous improvement over VS.NET 2002 and 2003. Microsoft made an amazing tool even better. The jump to VS.NET 2005 is so big compared to the jump from VS.NET 2002 to 2003 that it requires a chapter of its own. This chapter concentrates on all the new tips and tricks not found in previous versions. This does not mean that the first three chapters are not applicable to VS.NET 2005 anymore. In fact, most of them still work or have been greatly improved (unless otherwise noted).
This chapter does not cover version 2.0 of the .NET Framework and its new classes and syntax additions. Naturally, VS.NET 2005 is tied very much to version 2.0 of .NET, and occasionally I dive into version 2.0–specific code, but this is only done to demonstrate a new IDE feature. Whenever I simply refer to VS.NET in this chapter, I naturally mean VS.NET 2005.
This book is based on VS.NET 2005 Beta 1. The final version of VS.NET 2005 might differ slightly from how I describe it in this chapter.
Chapter 5: Other .NET Tips and Tricks
This chapter contains tips and tricks related specifically to .NET. Many of them are not related to VS.NET per se. However, I decided to include them in this book because they apply to most VS.NET developers. Developers who are new to .NET might not be familiar with some of these tips and tricks.
About the author
At the time of writing this book, Minh T. Nguyen was a website development engineer with Expedia.com. He has worked with Visual Studio .NET since its beta stages and regularly gives workshops and writes articles for the .NET community. He holds a BS degree in Computer Science from the University of California, Berkeley and currently works in Silicon Valley as a software design engineer in the Microsoft TV division.
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