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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.

Intermediate and advanced coverage of Visual Basic 2010 and .NET 4 for professional developers

If you've already covered the basics and want to dive deep into VB and .NET topics that professional programmers use most, this is your book. You'll find a quick review of introductory topics-always helpful-before the author team of experts moves you quickly into such topics as data access with ADO.NET, Language Integrated Query (LINQ), security, ASP.NET web programming with Visual Basic, Windows workflow, threading, and more.

You'll explore all the new features of Visual Basic 2010 as well as all the essential functions that you need, including .NET features such as LINQ to SQL, LINQ to XML, WCF, and more. Plus, you'll examine exception handling and debugging, Visual Studio features, and ASP.NET web programming.

• Expert author team helps you master the tools and techniques you need most for professional programming
• Reviews why Visual Basic 2010 will be synonymous with writing code in Visual Studio 2010
• Focuses on .NET features such as LINQ, LINQ to SQL, LINQ to XML, WPF, workflow, and more
• Discusses exception handling and debugging, data access with ADO.NET, Visual Studio features for Visual Basic developers, Windows programming with Windows Forms, ASP.NET web programming with VB, communication interfaces, Windows workflow, and threading

This Wrox guide presents you with updated coverage on topics you need to know now.

Microsoft® Visual Studio 2008 Unleashed is an end-to-end, deep dive into the Visual Studio development environment. It’s meant to provide you guidance on how you can squeeze the ultimate productivity out of the many features built into the .NET development tools. Understanding how to use your tools will make you a better developer. This book was written with that premise as its focus.

The authors have folded in real-world development experience alongside detailed information about the IDE. The result is practical, easy-to-employ information that will make you a more productive and complete developer. This book also helps to ease your transition from other development environments and former versions of Visual Studio.

Finally, this book provides an entire section dedicated to Visual Studio Team System. It will help you understand how the Team Architect, Team Developer, Team Database Developer, and Team Tester work with the Team Foundation Server to increase team collaboration, visibility, and productivity.

Microsoft® Visual Studio 2008 Unleashed provides straight, to-the-point answers to common developer questions about the IDE.

Detailed Information on…

• What’s new in Visual Studio 2008
• Working with solutions, projects, editors, and designers
• Writing ASP.NET applications
• Writing and consuming Web Services using Windows Communication Foundation (WCF)
• Writing Windows Forms and Windows Presentation Foundation (WPF) applications
• Creating and hosting workflow-based applications using Windows Workflow Foundation (WF)
• Working with data and databases
• Refactoring code
• Debugging code
• Automating the IDE
• Writing macros, add-ins, and wizards
• Using team collaboration and the Visual Studio Team System products
• Managing source code changes
• Tracking projects with Team Foundation Server and work items
• Modeling applications
• Performing unit, web, and load testing
• Working with Team Foundation Build

This book was written to introduce you to the features and capabilities that ASP.NET 3.5 offers, as well as to give you an explanation of the foundation that ASP.NET provides. We assume you have a general understanding of Web technologies, such as previous versions of ASP.NET, Active Server Pages 2.0/3.0, or JavaServer Pages. If you understand the basics of Web programming, you should not have much trouble following along with this book's content.

If you are brand new to ASP.NET, be sure to check out Beginning ASP.NET 3.5: In C# and VB by Imar Spaanjaars (Wiley Publishing, Inc., 2008) to help you understand the basics.

In addition to working with Web technologies, we also assume that you understand basic programming constructs, such as variables, For Each loops, and object-oriented programming.

You may also be wondering whether this book is for the Visual Basic developer or the C# developer. We are happy to say that it is for both! When the code differs substantially, this book provides examples in both VB and C#.

This book spends its time reviewing the 3.5 release of ASP.NET. Each major new feature included in ASP.NET 3.5 is covered in detail. The following list tells you something about the content of each chapter.

• Chapter 1, "Application and Page Frameworks." This chapter shows you how to build ASP.NET applications using IIS or the built-in Web server that comes with Visual Studio 2008. This chapter also shows you the folders and files that are part of ASP.NET. It discusses ways to compile code and shows you how to perform cross-page posting. This chapter ends by showing you easy ways to deal with your classes from within Visual Studio 2008.

• Chapters 2, 3, and 4.These three chapters are grouped here because they all deal with server controls. This batch of chapters starts by examining the idea of the server control and its pivotal role in ASP.NET development. In addition to looking at the server control framework, these chapters delve into the plethora of server controls that are at your disposal for ASP.NET development projects.

• Chapter 5, "Working with Master Pages."Master pages are a great capability found in ASP.NET. They provide a means of creating templated pages that enable you to work with the entire application, as opposed to single pages.

• Chapter 6, "Themes and Skins.” This chapter looks at how to deal with the styles that your applications require and shows you how to create a centrally managed look-and-feel for all the pages of your application by using themes and the skin files that are part of a theme.

• Chapter 7, "Data Binding in ASP.NET 3.5.” One of the more important tasks of ASP.NET is presenting data, and this chapter shows you how to do that with ASP.NET controls.

• Chapter 8, "Data Management with ADO.NET.” This chapter presents the ADO.NET data model provided by ASP.NET, which allows you to handle the retrieval, updating, and deleting of data quickly and logically.

• Chapter 9, "Querying with LINQ." LINQ is a set of extensions to the .NET Framework that encompass language-integrated query, set, and transform operations. This chapter introduces you to LINQ and how to use this new feature in web applications today.

• Chapter 10, "Working with XML and LINQ to XML." This chapter looks at the XML technologies built into ASP.NET and the underlying .NET Framework to help you easily extract, create, manipulate, and store XML..

• Chapter 11, "IIS7." Probably the most substantial release of IIS in its history, IIS 7.0 will change the way you host and work with your ASP.NET applications.

• Chapter 12, "Introduction to the Provider Model." A number of systems are built into ASP.NET that make the lives of developers so much easier and more productive than ever before. These systems are built upon an architecture called a provider model, which is rather extensible. This chapter gives an overview of this provider model and how it is used throughout ASP.NET 3.5.

• Chapter 13, "Extending the Provider Model." This chapter looks at some of the ways to extend the provider model found in ASP.NET 3.5. This chapter also reviews a couple of sample extensions to the provider model.

• Chapter 14, "Site Navigation." Many developers do not simply develop single pages—they build applications. One of the application capabilities provided by ASP.NET 3.5 is the site navigation system covered in this chapter.

• Chapter 15, "Personalization.". The ASP.NET team developed a way to store end user information—the ASP.NET personalization system.

• Chapter 16, "Membership and Role Management." This chapter covers the membership and role management system developed to simplify adding authentication and authorization to your ASP.NET applications. This chapter focuses on using the web.config file for controlling how these systems are applied, as well as on the server controls that work with the underlying systems.

• Chapter 17, "Portal Frameworks and Web Parts." This chapter explains Web Parts—a way of encapsulating pages into smaller and more manageable objects.

• Chapter 18, "HTML and CSS Design with ASP.NET." A lot of focus on building a CSS-based Web application was placed on Visual Studio 2008. This chapter takes a close look at how you can effectively work with HTML and CSS design for your ASP.NET applications.

• Chapter 19, "ASP.NET AJAX."AJAX signifies the capability to build applications that make use of the XMLHttpRequest object. New to Visual Studio 2008 is the ability to build AJAX-enabled ASP.NET applications from the default install of the IDE.

• Chapter 20, "ASP.NET AJAX Control Toolkit." This chapter takes a good look at the ASP.NET AJAX Control Toolkit, a series of new controls that are now available to make AJAX web development rather simple.

• Chapter 21, "Security." This security chapter discusses security beyond the membership and role management features provided by ASP.NET 3.5. This chapter provides an in-depth look at the authentication and authorization mechanics inherent in the ASP.NET technology, as well as HTTP access types and impersonations.

• Chapter 22, "State Management." Because ASP.NET is a request-response–based technology, state management and the performance of requests and responses take on significant importance. This chapter introduces these two separate but important areas of ASP.NET development.

• Chapter 23 , "Caching." Because of the request-response nature of ASP.NET, caching on the server becomes important to the performance of your ASP.NET applications. This chapter looks at some of the advanced caching capabilities provided by ASP.NET, including the SQL cache invalidation feature which is part of ASP.NET 3.5.

• Chapter 24, "Debugging and Error Handling." This chapter tells you how to properly structure error handling within your applications. It also shows you how to use various debugging techniques to find errors that your applications might contain.

• Chapter 25, "File I/O and Streams." More often than not, you want your ASP.NET applications to work with items that are outside the base application. This chapter takes a close look at working with various file types and streams that might come into your ASP.NET applications.

• Chapter 26, "User and Server Controls." This chapter describes building your own server controls and how to use them within your applications.

• Chapter 27, "Modules and Handlers." This chapter looks at two methods of manipulating the way ASP.NET processes HTTP requests: HttpModule and HttpHandler. Each method provides a unique level of access to the underlying processing of ASP.NET and can be powerful tools for creating web applications.

• Chapter 28, "Using Business Objects." You are going to have components created with previous technologies that you do not want to rebuild but that you do want to integrate into new ASP.NET applications. Beyond showing you how to integrate your COM components into your applications, this chapter shows you how to build newer style .NET components instead of turning to the previous COM component architecture.

• Chapter 29, "Building and Consuming Services." This chapter reveals the ease not only of building XML Web services, but consuming them in an ASP.NET application. This chapter then ventures further by describing how to build XML Web services that utilize SOAP headers and how to consume this particular type of service.

• Chapter 30, "Localization." ASP.NET provides an outstanding way to address the internationalization of Web applications. This chapter looks at some of the important items to consider when building your Web applications for the world.

• Chapter 31, "Configuration." This chapter teaches you to modify the capabilities and behaviors of ASP.NET using the various configuration files at your disposal.

• Chapter 32, "Instrumentation." The ASP.NET framework includes performance counters, the capability to work with the Windows Event Tracing system, possibilities for application tracing , and the most exciting part of this discussion—a health monitoring system that allows you to log a number of different events over an application's lifetime.

• Chapter 33, "Administration and Management." This chapter provides an overview of the new GUI tools that come with APS.NET that enable you to manage your Web applications easily and effectively.

• Chapter 34, "Packaging and Deploying ASP.NET Applications." This chapter takes the application building process one-step further and shows you how to package your ASP.NET applications for easy deployment.

• Appendix A, "Migrating Older ASP.NET Projects." This appendix focuses on migrating ASP.NET 1.x, or 2.0 applications to the 3.5 framework.

• Appendix B, "ASP.NET Ultimate Tools." Based on Scott Hanse...

Harness the power of SQL Server, Microsoft’s high-performance database and data analysis software package, by accesing everything you need to know in Microsoft SQL Server 2008 Bible. Learn the best practices, tips, and tricks from this comprehensive tutorial and reference, which includes specific examples and sample code, with nearly every task demonstrated in both a graphical and SQL code method. Understand how to develop SQL Server databases and data connections, how to administer the SQL Server and keep databases performing optimally, and how to navigate all the new features of the 2008 release.

The Microsoft Windows Presentation Foundation is a key part of .NET 3.5 and provides the foundation for building applications and high-quality user experiences in Windows Vista. It is likely to see wide adoption across the Microsoft .NET programming community.

WPF blends together user-interface design, documents, and media content, while exploiting the full power of your computer for the first time (it is able to write output directly to your computers graphics card).

This book explains how WPF works from the ground up. It will be one of the first books available, and also one of the most detailed. It follows on from the author’s previous and highly successful books, covering Windows Forms (WPF's predecessor technology) and earlier versions of WPF. It is a one-stop shop in Apress’ proven ‘Pro’ style that leaves readers with a deep understanding of the technology and able to take the concepts away and apply them for themselves.

Since 1994 when he wrote his first “Hitchhiker’s Guide”, William Vaughn has been providing developers all over the world the intimate details of how SQL Server can be accessed and managed from RAD languages like Visual Basic and Visual Basic .NET. With the 7th Edition, Bill has completely rewritten this encyclopedic work from cover to cover–giving readers his insightful views on how applications should be built to maximize both developer and code performance. Visual Studio and the languages it hosts have never been as sophisticated as they are today–the same can be said for SQL Server. This makes it even more important for developers to understand how to best leverage their features without being held back by their complexity. That’s what this book is all about–making it easier for developers regardless of their know-how.

The 7th edition is unique in that it’s designed to provide not only up-to-date tutorials on the latest development tools provided by Visual Studio and SQL Server, but also a solid platform of architectural advice and rich examples for developers trying to choose between the myriad of platform options. Beginners and experts alike will find comprehensive step-by-step instructions that can make the reader’s introduction to the latest versions of Visual Studio and SQL Server far easier.

Key topic coverage includes:

• Data access architectures and how to choose the best strategy for Windows Forms, ASP.NET, XML Web Services, and SQL Server CLR executables. Where

do these make sense and how much will they cost to build and maintain?

• SQL Server and relational database fundamentals and inner-machinery.

How does SQL Server work and why is it important that developers know?

• Making the development experience more productive through judicious use of the Visual Studio toolset, and how to know when the wizards can help.

• Using the latest ADO.NET data provider efficiently and safely.

• How to protect the security of your database–and your job–by avoiding common mistakes.

• How to build secure, efficient, scalable applications in less time with fewer resources–how to create faster code faster.

• How to leverage the potential of SQL Server CLR executables and knowing

when these features make sense.

• How to work with your DBA to maintain database integrity and security.

• Working with the new Visual Studio report controls to expose your

organization’s data safely and easily with or without leveraging existing

SQL Server Reporting Services technology.

William R. Vaughn is the President of Beta V Corporation and a Microsoft MVP. In 2000 he retired from Microsoft after 14 years to focus on mentoring, speaking, and writing. His specialty is data access application design especially when connecting to SQL Server–over the years he’s written 12 books on the subject. He’s a popular speaker at technical conferences all over the world where his wit and no-holds-barred technical insights win him rave reviews. William is also a member of the prestigious INETA Speaker’s Bureau. His works include articles for SQL Server Magazine and a bi-weekly editorial for Processor Magazine as well as books published by Microsoft Press and Apress.

The book includes a DVD that contains a wealth of examples as well as several sample databases used to illustrate points discussed in the book. Authenticated readers will also have unrestricted access to the book’s supporting web site, www.hitchhikerguides.net, where additional examples, online forums, and other supplementary materials are available.

www.awprofessional.com/msserverseries

www.hitchhikerguides.net

www.betav.com/blogs/billva

www.betav.com

Visual Studio .NET and Online Application Development was written to give students exposure to the various languages that comprise Visual Studio.NET. This text begins by giving students a clear explanation of various development tools and how they are integrated making up VS.NET. The text then shows students how to apply those tools to Web Services, Web Applications, and Project Management.

This end-to-end deep dive into Microsoft Visual Studio 2010 Professional will help working developers squeeze maximum productivity out of Visual Studio 2010’s extraordinarily rich toolbox, whether they are writing code for the Web, Windows, Silverlight, or Microsoft’s Azure cloud computing environment.

The authors combine authoritative and detailed information about Microsoft’s latest IDE, with extensive insights and best practices drawn from decades of development experience. Developers will learn how to use Visual Studio 2010 Professional to take full advantage of the entire .NET platform, including Windows Presentation Foundation (WPF) for rich client development, Windows Communication Foundation (WCF) for building dynamic service-oriented solutions, and Windows Workflow Foundation (WF) for structured programming around business processes. The authors also present extensive new coverage of Microsoft’s powerful new tools for unit testing, application instrumentation, and code analysis.

By focusing entirely on Visual Studio 2010 Professional, the authors have gone deeper into Microsoft’s core product than ever before. Throughout, their focus is relentlessly practical: how to apply Microsoft’s tools to build better software, faster.

Detailed information on how to...

n Work with solutions, projects, browsers, explorers, editors, and designers

n Write better macros, add-ins, and wizards

n Save more time with Visual Studio 2010’s updated productivity tools

n Instrument, analyze, and test your software

n Refactor code for greater robustness, maintainability, and performance

n Share code with team members and the larger community

n Write powerful ASP.NET, ASP.NET MVC, and Silverlight web applications

n Implement robust service oriented architecture (SOA)–based applications

n Efficiently consume services with WCF

n Write advanced Windows applications with Windows Forms and WPF

n Construct data-centric applications with LINQ and Entity Framework

n Create and host workflow-based applications with WF

n Write applications for the Azure cloud

n Extend Visual Studio with the new Managed Extensibility Framework (MEF) and the Automation Object Model

n Build better object-oriented VB or C# software, and use new dynamic language features

ON THE WEB:

Download all examples and source code presented in this book from informit.com/title/9780672330810

visualstudiounleashed.com