How This Book Is Organized

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How This Book Is Organized The book is divided into 13 chapters, organized by subject: Chapter 1, Master Projects and Solutions Projects and solutions are used to organize files, executables, class libraries, and anything else that makes up your application. Consequently, learning how to get the most out of projects and solutions can greatly improve your experience with Visual Studio. This chapter covers how to get the most out of projects and solutions, including getting down and dirty with the undocumented format of project and solution files. Chapter 2, Master the Editor At its heart, Visual Studio is just an editor, but it is quite a powerful editor. The Visual Studio editor includes features like IntelliSense, Syntax Coloring, Outlining, and much more. Visual Studio 2005 adds refactoring and code snippet functionality to the already-feature-rich editor of Visual Studio. This chapter covers how to get the most out of the editor by showing how to use these features to the fullest, as well as adding additional functionality to the editor through the use of third-party add-ins. Chapter 3, Navigating Visual Studio Visual Studio includes a staggering number of windows, toolbars, commands, and editors. Visual Studio also includes an impressive number of ways to easily navigate both the application and your source code. This chapter covers how to easily move around the Visual Studio application as well as how to navigate your own source code. Chapter 4, Customizing Visual Studio When writing code, it is nice to have things just the way you like them, and Visual Studio gives you plenty of opportunities to customize the application just the way you want it. This chapter covers how to customize shortcut keys, toolbars, menus, the toolbox, and much more. There is nothing better than getting it just the way you want it. Chapter 5, Debugging A large part of developing an application is finding and removing all the bugs in that application, which is where debugging comes in. Visual Studio provides an excellent debugging experience, making it easier than ever to find and fix bugs in your applications. This chapter covers how to get the most out of the debugger including how to debug not only your source code, but also T-SQL and scripting languages. Chapter 6, Speed Hacks Developers are constantly looking for ways to write code faster and more efficiently. This chapter covers a number of ways to write code more efficiently, including a number of macros to help automatically create connection strings, sign assemblies, update references, and more. This chapter also covers how to use the command window, as well as how to write and use custom tools to automatically generate code like collections and configuration sections. Chapter 7, Help and Research As a modern developer, you need to be able to quickly find answers to things you don't know, because it is simply impossible to know everything any more. This chapter covers various ways to get answers to your questions from within Visual Studio using the default help system or using add-ins to add more options. Another important part of development is being able to research how the internals of your application function. This chapter covers a number of applications that can be used to research how your application functions, including what IL it generates, statistics on your code, and what objects your application creates. Chapter 8, Comments and Documentation Code comments and documentation are very important parts of any application. When developers are maintaining an application or writing the next version of it, good comments and documentation are an invaluable resource. Writing this documentation is not always a pleasant experience though, since it is time consuming and sometimes tedious. This chapter covers how to use XML comments in .NET to make the creation of documentation easier, including a number of timesaving add-ins and applications. Chapter 9, Server Explorer Hacks The Server Explorer is one of the more neglected portions of Visual Studio. This chapter attempts to remedy that fact by covering how the Server Explorer can be used to interface with databases, services, and performance counters, as well as WMI. Chapter 10, Work with Visual Studio Tools Visual Studio includes a number of different tools that are not part of the normal IDE. This chapter covers how you can access a special command prompt, stress test applications, and generate code and UML, as well as obfuscate code with the various tools included with Visual Studio. Chapter 11, Visual Studio Tools for Office Visual Studio Tools for Office give you the opportunity to extend Office applications using the .NET language of your choice. This chapter covers the basics of using these tools, including a sample Word application and a sample Excel application. Chapter 12, Extending Visual Studio The nice thing about an application like Visual Studio is that, because its target audience is developers, the application authors know that those developers will want to write code that extends the functionality of the application. Visual Studio provides a number of different ways that you can extend its functionality. This chapter covers the Visual Studio extensibility model and how to create Visual Studio add-ins, as well as how to extend Visual Studio through normal Windows applications. Chapter 13, Enhancing Visual Studio A large number of add-ins and applications that enhance the functionality of Visual Studio are available. This chapter covers some of the better add-ins and applications that have not already been covered in other chapters. Some of the add-ins covered give you the ability to unit-test applications inside of Visual Studio, help with writing Web Services, blog from Visual Studio, spellcheck your code, and much more.

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