Microsoft Visual Studio 2010 Unleashed

Microsoft Visual Studio 2010 Unleashed provides a fairly thorough overview of the fundamental features of Visual Studio 2010 Professional edition. In other words, it covers the core development tools and technologies of Visual Studio but it does not cover the additional features of high-end editions such as Visual Studio Premium and Ultimate. Nor does it have much to say about Team Foundation Server (which was covered in some detail in the book’s previous edition for VS 2008).

The book is divided into five sections. Part 1 is an introduction to VS 2010, including an overview of its many tools, windows and menus, for anyone who’s never used Visual Studio before; this is followed by a lightweight introduction to programming .NET with C# or VB (C++ and F# are only mentioned in passing). Part 2 is described as ‘An In-Depth Look at the IDE’. This explains a few of the inner mysteries of Solution and Project files, how to set project dependencies, use the Class View, Server Explorer and the various editors and designers. Part 3 describes code editing features such as syntax coloring, outlining and IntelliSense, plus debugging. Part 4 gives a very simple overview of extending Visual Studio using macros and add-ins. Part 5 is devoted to ‘enterprise’ development using ASP .NET to create Windows Forms and WPF applications. This section also describes ‘cloud applications’ using Microsoft’s Azure. Silverlight 3 is covered briefly, in just a few pages, and Silverlight 4, which was not available at the time the book was being written, is dispensed with in a few bullet points.

Overall this is a good book for someone who needs a quick way to ’find their way around’ the large number of features, utilities and options in Visual Studio 2010. In spite of its large size (1196 pages) it is not a comprehensive guide, however. Most sections in the book supply an introduction to the topics which they describe rather than an exhaustive treatment of those topics. This, to be frank, unavoidable since the scope of the book is enormous. In spite of its title, it is much more than a guide merely to the Visual Studio IDE. It also has information and tutorials on a number of the languages and technologies which the IDE supports - everything from the unit testing framework to SQL Server databases.

If you are looking for an advanced reference to some specific tool or technology supported by VS 2010, this is not the book to get. But if you want a good overview of the VS 2010 environment and its core development technologies, Microsoft Visual Studio 2010 Unleashed would be a useful reference.