Ryan M. Moenck said
I'm through the first chapter and into the second; I've learned about 5-10 useful things that I've already put into practice at work.
John Grove said
This books rocks but it is very small. I saw it at Borders running for a little bit more then Amazon. I sat and almost read the whole thing while I was at Borders. Great book, but it really should be a little bit less.
PrettyField said
I thought this book was really going to help me learn important tricks to make Visual Studio use more productive, but I was pretty disappointed. There are a lot of tips, for sure, mostly having to do with arcane keyboard shortcuts. There were several which were absolute gold, but most of them did little for me, and the truly great tips were so buried in the clutter, they were hard to find. Perhaps a tip rating system (5 star tips vs 1 star tips) might have helped. The worst thing was that there were these constant blog-like entries which provided no content whatsoever; I especially grew to dislike the "I'm not sure what good this tip is, but you can also do this..." gibberish. I realize that's because the book contents were taken from the author's blog, but it makes for a really poor book-reading experience. It seemed hastily put-together and poorly edited. I wasn't looking for a terse academic treatise, but I really disliked the blog delivery. It was all "ah, heck" folksy attempt with very little content per page.
90% of all Microsoft Press books are really good; I was disappointed to find that this book is clearly in the 10% which are not. I strongly urge Microsoft not to permit this kind of watered-down content in future MP books, and I urge readers to look for something better.
Ross Mason said
Scott Mitchell of MSDN turned me on to this book, Visual Studio Tips. It came in this morning and I have spent the rest of the day going through it. It is outstanding. Who knew the IDE was so feature rich. Most of the code I write today is in Visual studio. The tips in Sara's book have opened up a whole new world of efficiency for me.
My Top Five Tips from Sara Ford
5) Tip 3.1 Incremental searches
4) Tip 2.29 Bookmark all Quick Find results, However I wish it would bookmark all my quick replacements so I could review them to make sure I didn't replace something wrong.
3) Tip 4.7 Ctrl-Tab through open files
2) Tip 4.3/4.4 copy a files full path and open the explore to the active file folder
1) Tip 2.40 Tab Tab to insert Snippets
I recommend this book to anyone who codes in the Visual Studio.
Flyingfysh said
I heard a talk by another Microsoft employee yesterday, and he said that *all* of Sara Ford's proceeds from this book are going to rebuild Waveland Mississippi, which was devastated by Katrina. And Microsoft is matching those contributions 100%. I haven't seen the book yet, but I'd say that is a good reason to give this one 5 stars.
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