Coming Soon: Visual Studio Hacks
James finally announced the other day the book he’s been working on for so long: Visual Studio Hacks (O’Reilly publisher). I think this is going to be a great book as it demonstrates very well a bunch of things developers can do to greatly speed up and enhance their productivity with Visual Studio (it covers 2002, 2003, and even some of 2005!). I was privileged enough to have James ask me to be a contributor and a technical reviewer. For me, it was a lot of fun to do because I’d always wanted to write a book, or at least help anyway. Of course, it was much more fun for me than James because my deadlines were… uh… not quite the same as the deadlines he had :-)
Anyway, like Scott mentions in his post, most of the hacks were written by James (obviously), with a smaller chunk written by a handful of contributors. The hacks I wrote were:
- Follow the Rules with FxCop
- Generate Strongly-Typed Datasets
- Obfuscate Your Code
- Perform Stress Testing
- Generate Code From UML
- Generate UML Design Docs from Code
Overall, James did a hell of a job pulling this book off. He and I had many late night messenger chats about various book items, and it was just cool to do. And if I ever were to write a book, he’d be one of the first people I’d call.
