Visual Studio Hacks [Electronic resources] نسخه متنی

How This Book Is Organized

The book is divided into 13 chapters, organized by subject:

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.