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Microsoft is introducing a large number of changes to the way that the .NET Framework operates. Familiar technologies are being altered, best practices replaced, and developer methodologies adjusted. Many developers find it hard to keep up with the pace of change across .NET's ever-widening array of technologies. You may know what's happening in C#, but how about the Azure cloud? How is that going to affect your work? What are the limitations of the new pLINQ syntax? What you need is a roadmap. A guide to help you see the innovations that matter and to give you a head start on the opportunities available in the new framework.

Introducing .NET 4.0: with Visual Studio 2010 is designed to provide you with just that roadmap. It serves as a no-nonsense primer that will help experienced .NET developers understand the impact of the new framework and its associated technologies.This book will keep you updated on the changes and help you to seize new opportunities confidently and quickly.

What you'll learn

• Get an overview and brief history of each new or changing technology that puts it into context
• Familiarize yourself with key concepts and opportunities through highly accessible tutorials
• Understand how to perform common tasks in new technology areas such as pLINQ
• Gain expert performance tips
• See examples of real-world applications of each technology to help you learn how a technology can be put to work

Who is this book for?

The book is aimed at .NET 3.5 developers who will be trying to get to grips with .NET 4.0 and the associated supporting technologies, such as ASP.NET MVC, pLINQ, etc., which will be changing the way they need to think about creating applications.

“Once this skill is within your everyday comfort zone, it will give your productivity a boost and increase your value to your team. I encourage you to add the techniques outlined in this book to your toolset and to use them to develop your own workbench of generative tools. In doing so, I’m confident you’ll improve your capabilities, and what’s more, have fun doing so.”

–From the Foreword by Gareth Jones, Developer Architect, Visual Studio®, Microsoft

 

Enlist Visual Studio’s Built-in Code Generation Tools to Write Better Software Faster

 

Automatic code generation can dramatically increase your productivity, improve code quality and maintainability, promote reuse, and help you extend best practices throughout your development organization. .NET and Visual Studio contain many powerful, code-generation tools--and this book shows you how to succeed with all of them. With Practical Code Generation in .NET, spend less time writing monotonous, repetitive code--leaving more time to address troublesome areas!

 

Microsoft MVP Peter Vogel covers code generation with Visual Studio 2010, 2008, and 2005, as well as all recent versions of .NET, including .NET 4.0. You’ll learn when enlisting code generation makes sense and how to design solutions that build on the skills and resources you already have.

 

Writing for experienced programmers, Vogel shows how to generate reliable code using procedural code, Visual Studio add-ins, XML, configuration files, and more--including Microsoft’s innovative CodeDOM technology for generating code in multiple languages. He brings everything together in three complete, chapter-length case studies.

 

Coverage includes

•  Understanding the structure of .NET code-generation solutions and best practices for architecting them

•  Creating Visual Studio add-ins that quickly integrate code generation into day-to-day activities

•  Using objects and methods to add or remove project components

•  Using text insertion to generate code using any tool--even standard string handling functions

•  Working with the specific features of C#, Visual Basic .NET, and ASP.NET

•  Generating more concise code with .NET’s new Text Template Transformation Toolkit (T4)

•  Building code-generation solutions with Visual Studio templates, attributes, and custom tools

•  Distributing code-generation solutions

Get up to speed on Application Lifecycle Management (ALM) with Visual Studio 2010 through a combination of hands-on instruction and deep-dives.

Microsoft has packed a lot of brand new testing and modeling tools into Visual Studio 2010, tools that previously were available only to Microsoft internal development teams. Developers will appreciate the focus on practical implementation techniques and best practices.

A team of Microsoft insiders provides a nuts-and-bolts approach. This Wrox guide is designed as both a step-by-step guide and a reference for modeling, designing, and coordinating software development solutions at every level using Visual Studio 2010 and Visual Studio Team Foundation Server 2010.

Visual Studio 2010 offers a complete lifecycle management system that covers modeling, testing, code analysis, collaboration, build and deployment tools.

Coverage includes:

• An Introduction to Software Architecture
• Top-down Design with Use Case Diagrams, Activity Diagrams, and Sequence Diagrams
• Top-down Design with Component and Class Diagrams
• Analyzing Applications Using Architecture Explorer
• Using Layer Diagrams
• An Introduction to Software Development
• Unit Testing with the Unit Test Framework
• Managed Code Analysis and Code Metrics
• Profiling and Performance
• Database Development, Testing, and Deployment
• An Introduction to IntelliTrace
• An Introduction to Software Testing
• Web Performance and Load Testing
• Manual Testing
• Coded User Interface Testing
• Lab Management
• Introduction to Team Foundation Server
• Team Foundation Architecture
• Team Foundation Version Control
• Branching and Merging
• Team Foundation Build
• An Introduction to Project Management
• Process Templates
• Using Reports, Portals, and Dashboards
• Agile Planning Using Planning Workbooks
• Process Template Customizations

Professional Application Lifecycle Management with Visual Studio 2010 shows developers, testers, architects and project managers alike how to leverage the power of Visual Studio 2010 to streamline software design and development.

Aimed at enterprise developers who use Visual Studio 2008, ASP.NET, C#, and SQL Server to deliver business applications, this book focuses on implementing patterns that can be used for real-world solutions. Each chapter establishes a problem, examines which solution will provide the best results, and then demonstrates how to go about executing that solution. The experienced author addresses building a framework for corporate intranet apps, designing the data access layer, implementing the Microsoft exception handling app block, customizing view and reports with Query Builder Control, installing the application, and much more.

A must-have guide that covers all the new features of Visual Studio 2010

Visual Studio allows you to create and manage programming projects for the Windows platform, and the new 2010 version has undergone a major overhaul comprised of significant changes. Written by an author team of veteran programmers and developers, Professional Visual Studio 2010 gets you quickly up to speed on what you can expect from the newest version of Visual Studio.

This book's first section is dedicated to familiarizing you with the core aspects of Visual Studio 2010. Everything you need is contained in the first five chapters, from the IDE structure and layout to the various options and settings you can change to make the user interface synchronize with your own way of doing things.

From there, the remainder of the book is broken into 11 parts:

• Getting Started: In this part, you learn how to take control of your projects and organize them in ways that work with your own style.
• Digging Deeper: Though the many graphical components of Visual Studio that make a programmer's job easier are discussed in many places throughout this book, you often need help when you're in the process of actually writing code. This part deals with features that support the coding of applications such as IntelliSense, code refactoring, and creating and running unit tests In the latest version of the .NET framework, enhancements were added to support dynamic languages and move towards feature parity between the two primary .NET languages, C# and VB. This part covers changes to these languages, as well as looking at a range of features that will help you write better and more consistent code.
• Rich Client and Web Applications: For support building everything from Office add-ins to cloud applications, Visual Studio enables you to develop applications for a wide range of platforms. These two parts cover the application platforms that are supported within Visual Studio 2010, including ASP.NET and Office, WPF, Silverlight 2 and ASP.NET MVC.
• Data: A large proportion of applications use some form of data storage. Visual Studio 2010 and the .NET Framework include strong support for working with databases and other data sources. This part examines how to use DataSets, the Visual Database Tools, LINQ, Synchronization Services and ADO.NET Entity Framework to build applications that work with data. It also shows you how you can then present this data using Reporting.
• Application Services: Through the course of building an application you are likely to require access to services that may or may not reside within your organization. This part covers core technologies such as WCF, WF, Synchronization Services and WCF RIA services that you can use to connect to these services.
• Configuration and Internationalization: The built-in support for configuration files allows you to adjust the way an application functions on the fly without having to rebuild it. Furthermore, resource files can be used to both access static data and easily localize an application into foreign languages and cultures. This part of the book shows how to use .NET configuration and resource files.
• Debugging: Application debugging is one of the more challenging tasks developers have to tackle, but correct use of the Visual Studio 2010 debugging features will help you analyze the state of the application and determine the cause of any bugs. This part examines the rich debugging support provided by the IDE.
• Build and Deployment: In addition to discussing how to build your solutions effectively and getting applications into the hands of your end users, this part also deals with the process of upgrading your projects from previous versions.
• Customizing and Extending Visual Studio: If the functionality found in the previous part isn't enough to help you in your coding efforts, Microsoft has made Visual Studio 2010 even more extensible. This part covers the automation model, how to write add-ins and macros, and then how to use a new extensibility framework, MEF, to extend Visual Studio 2010.
• Visual Studio Ultimate: The final part of the book examines the additional features only available in the Premium and Ultimate versions of Visual Studio 2010. In addition, you'll also learn how the Team Foundation Server provides an essential tool for managing software projects.

Though this breakdown of the Visual Studio feature set provides the most logical and easily understood set of topics, you may need to look for specific functions that will aid you in a particular activity. To address this need, references to appropriate chapters are provided whenever a feature is covered in more detail elsewhere in the book.

Professional Visual Studio 2010 is for all developers new to Visual Studio as well as those programmers who have some experience but want to learn about features they may have previously overlooked.

If you are familiar with the way previous versions of Visual Studio worked, you may want to skim over Part I, which deals with the basic constructs that make up the user interface, and move on to the remainder of the book where the new features found in Visual Studio 2010 are discussed in detail. While you may be familiar with most of Part I, it is worth reading this section in case there are features of Visual Studio 2010 that you haven't seen or used before.

If you're just starting out, you'll greatly benefit from the first part, where basic concepts are explained and you're introduced to the user interface and how to customize it to suit your own style.

Visual Studio .NET All-in-One Desk Reference For Dummies is a value-packed, easy-to-use reference that provides broad coverage of Visual Studio .NET tools, languages, and environment for experienced Visual Studio programmers and developers who want to get up to speed rapidly on this missioncritical Microsoft initiative.

This certification exam measures the ability to develop and implement Windows-based applications by using Windows Forms and the Microsoft .NET Framework. This exam counts as a core credit toward the new MCAD (Microsoft Certified Application Developer) certification as well as a core credit toward the existing MCSD certification. Readers preparing for this exam find our Training Guide series to be the most successful self-study tool in the market. This book is their one-stop shop because of its teaching methodology, the accompanying ExamGear testing software, and superior Web site support at www.quepublishing.com/certification. The CD features our ExamGear product (test simulation with more than 150 practice questions) and an electronic copy of the book.

Professional Visual Studio 2008

Microsoft Visual Studio 2008 is the latest version in the ongoing evolution of the Integrated Development Environment (IDE), and this resource examines the diverse facets of the IDE—from common tasks to intricate functions to the powerful tools that accompany the main code editing and design windows. Written by a unique author duo and offering an in-depth look at the powerful and fascinating features and techniques of the IDE, this book explores each aspect of the development life cycle from the perspective of how Visual Studio 2008 can make your life easier.

Each chapter is packed with examples that illustrate uses for various tools, commands, and shortcuts of Visual Studio 2008. You will gradually learn to identify where a feature is used, conclude how you can use it to its fullest potential, and then seamlessly apply that feature to help solve real-world problems.

What you will learn from this book

• How to create project templates and wizards

• Methods for using IntelliSense, code refactoring, class modeling, and unit testing

• Tips for using DataSets, LINQ, and Synchronization Services for working with data

• How to build web applications using ASP.NET AJAX, Silverlight, and ASP.NET MVC

• Ideas for building Office and Mobile applications, WPF, WCF, and WF projects

• Ways to effectively analyze and identify bugs using the advanced debugging features

• How to automate repetitive tasks using the Visual Studio 2008 add-ins and macros

• Suggestions for using Visual Studio Team System components coupled with Team Foundation Server

• Techniques for building more secure applications

Who this book is for
This book is for programmers who want to become proficient with the latest version of Visual Studio and are interested in the advanced capabilities of the IDE.

Wrox Professional guides are planned and written by working programmers to meet the real-world needs of programmers, developers, and IT professionals. Focused and relevant, they address the issues technology professionals face every day. They provide examples, practical solutions, and expert education in new technologies, all designed to help programmers do a better job.

With this book, you will learn how to create engaging and interactive web applications using the latest version of the world's most popular web development platform: ASP.NET with AJAX, built on the productivity-enhancing features of Visual Studio 2008.
All you need to get started is a basic knowledge of HTML and a desire to produce professional quality websites.
Learning ASP.NET 3.5 introduces new skills in each new chapter and offers fully annotated and fully functional examples that you can put to work immediately. Each chapter adds detailed summaries, practice questions to ensure comprehension, and exercises so you can apply what you've learned to new situations.
Written by the bestselling author team of Jesse Liberty, Dan Hurwitz, and Brian MacDonald, Learning ASP.NET 3.5 offers complete, up-to-date coverage of ASP.NET 3.5 and AJAX. The book includes:

• Chapters that are designed as a series of tutorials on different aspects of web development
• Examples in each chapter that illustrate how a new concept works. Different chapters feature either a single running example with several stages, or a series of smaller examples
• A single large example in the final chapter offers that uses everything the reader has learned
• VB, JavaScript, and SQL Cheat Sheet sidebars to help readers with no little or no background with those topics
• AJAX-style fully integrated into ASP.NET programming -- the way it should be taught and used

If you want to get up to speed with the world's most popular web development technology, Learning ASP.NET 3.5 is the best resource for the job.

Sams Teach Yourself Visual Studio .NET in 21 Days will help developers that are new to application development and experienced developers understand how to use the .NET Framework and Visual Studio .NET to rapidly develop any type of computer application. The Visual Studio .NET development environment is the most comprehensive developer tool ever created, putting that together with the .NET Frameworks' Class Libraries, the developer has everything he or she needs to get up-to-speed on Microsoft's latest revolution in application development. This book will guide the developer through using the VS .NET IDE, the Visual Basic .NET and C# language, and the supporting tools available from Microsoft to create Windows and Web-based applications. The market is full of books that pretty much say the same thing, which is already available in the help files, the author of this book has written and deployed over a dozen successful applications using Visual Studio .NET and the .NET Framework. All of his expertise and experience is used to give you the most comprehensive title on using Visual Studio .NET.