Ged Mead
Ged Mead (XTab) has been around computers since the 1980's when the first affordable home computers came on the market. His journey from that very first Dragon 32 to the present has taken him through many different facets of the IT Industry. These include formal training as a Systems Analyst, employment in a mainframe software development environment, and a short time spent demonstrating rugged military IT systems in the days when it took two strong men to carry a 'mobile' system.
His most rewarding challenge was the creation of a financial management system for a large organisation.
Now based in an idyllic lochside location in the West of Scotland, he is currently involved in a range of development projects, whenever he can drag his gaze away from the stunning surrounding views, that is!
Ged is a Microsoft MVP, Senior Editor for DevCity.NET, vbCity Developer Community Leader and Admin, Helper of the Month competition winner and DevCity.NET newsletter Editor.
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Introduction
I'm sure that the 80/20 Rule applies to Visual Studio 2005 in much the same way as it applies to most large applications or major software suites; that's the belief that 80% of users only make use of 20% of the tools available. And when the tool is as comprehensive and complex as the Visual Studio IDE it isn't really surprising if this is the case. This book aims to help you increase your productivity by showing you how to use many of the tools available.
As I was reading through the book, I started to write detailed comments on each chapter but - with a total of 56 chapters to get through - I discovered before I was halfway through that if I kept it up, the review would be almost as long the book ! So I have just homed in with details on those that particularly caught my attention for one reason or another. The other chapters generally just get a quick summary. The list of chapter headings is available from the Wiley site here.
Book Structure
The book has been broken down into ten parts which are listed below (there is more detail of what they contain on the next page). Although some of the topics are spread between more than one Part, generally the authors have tried to keep related material together. Not an easy task with such a diverse range of subjects and it is almost inevitable that some of the links between main heading and chapter title are a bit artificial.
The ten parts are:
- The IDE
- Project and Solution Design
- Documentation and Research
- Security and Modeling
- Coding
- Automation
- Other Time Savers
- Build and Deployment
- Debugging and Testing
- Extensions for VS 2005
Quite usefully, the Wiley site also offers you a chance to look at the sub-topics covered chapter by chapter. You can view or download it in PDF format from here. If you are thinking about buying this book, I would recommend that you take a look at this as it is a very useful guide to what each chapter covers in detail.
You can check out the authors' writing styles by viewing the PDF version of Chapter 1 which is available here. As you will see if you do view that sample chapter, the explanations are liberally interspersed with screen shots; something that is quite useful in a book of this kind.