Whenever you see an All-in-One title from For Dummies press, think about a number of mini-books placed under one cover. In this case, you get seven mini-books in an 816-page tome, which means that each book averages 117-pages. Using the mini-book concept makes the huge amount of content between the covers more approachable. Most people can read a 117-page book without too much effort and the mini-books seemed designed to keep the topics different enough that you won’t feel compelled to read more than one book at a time. In this book, you get mini-books entitled: Visual Studio 2008 Overview, Getting Started with Visual Studio 2008, Building Applications, Getting Acquainted with Data Access, Coding, Going the Extra Mile, and Extending Visual Studio.

What is it all about?

This book focuses on Visual Studio 2008. Of course, you can’t have a book about Visual Studio without providing some type of programming example. The authors have wisely chosen to provide examples for both Visual Basic.NET and C# developers. Sorry, if you’re a C++ developer, you won’t find any examples in your language in this book. I therefore found it quite funny that the first The 5th Wave joke for the book mentioned having to learn C++ after all (you’ll just have to buy the book to see what I’m talking about). Because of the way the book is organized, I’ve decided to review it mini-book-by-mini-book.

The Visual Studio 2008 Overview mini-book introduces you to Visual Studio. You get the standard overview of new features you can expect to find in Visual Studio 2008. In addition, you’ll find some historical information about .NET, the standard .NET languages, and some crystal ball viewing into the future of .NET. The authors then take an unexpected, and welcome, divergence from the usual to discuss modern software development—essentially a good overview of software engineering practices. These divergences make the book particularly useful even to the professional developer. However, after this chapter, the authors begin covering the expected again, including an essay on the languages supplied with Visual Studio (I wish they had discussed some of the unusual add-on languages you can use, such as Perl.NET) and the Visual Studio editions. Actually, it would have been nice if the authors had skipped the last topic on Visual Studio editions and used the pages somewhere else, because the vast majority of readers will already have their copy of Visual Studio .NET installed when they buy this heavy tome.

The Getting Started with Visual Studio 2008 mini-book begins with a chapter on installation and a second chapter with a quick overview of the IDE. Most readers will probably skip the first chapter and many others will skip the second. However, the third chapter provides another one of those interesting divergences because it covers help in a way that most authors don’t consider. The authors provide a wealth of useful information that even some experienced readers will want to skim. The final chapter discusses the topic of upgrading, which just about anyone who hasn’t upgraded to Visual Studio 2008 will find useful.

The Building Applications mini-book is precisely what you might expect. The chapters discuss how to build basic applications. The authors do provide a number helpful tips and techniques for what they call smart application design. This mini-book shines with examples of how to incorporate at least a few software engineering design concepts into basic application design and is a refreshing from the usual click this, see this happen, kind of book. For example, this is one of the few books I’ve seen that discuss proper use of the Anchor property. You’ll also find a chapter on working with C++ and another on Asynchronous JavaScript and XML (AJAX). I found the chapter on ASP.NET services especially nice and the mobile device chapter will at least get you started. Even so, most of the coverage in these chapters is light when it comes to actual development—the focus remains carefully placed on Visual Studio.

The Getting Acquainted with Data Access mini-book is all about Visual Studio and the coverage of actual data access techniques is incredibly light. Yes, you’ll be able to create connections after you read this mini-book and use those connections to display data, but trying to create a comprehensive treatment of such a huge topic in such a small mini-book is impossible. The authors do the best job possible, but don’t look for anything amazing here. If your only interest is discovering how Visual Studio creates connections, you’ll be satisfied, but get one the dedicated database management books of anything more extensive. The one problem with this mini-book is that the author focus seems to wane. The authors probably would have been better off focusing attention on SQL Server, rather than trying to discuss XML data sources as well. This mini-book also contains a less than helpful discussion of LINQ that seems to be added solely to check a box on a list of things to do.

The Coding mini-book is one of my favorites in the book. In this book, the authors focus not so much on coding technique as to how Visual Studio can help you create better code. For example, unlike many books, you’ll find a complete description of all of those text editor options that make coding easier, but no one seems to want to discuss. The mini-book also tells you about cues that Visual Studio provides that there’s something wrong with your code. The discussion of data types in Chapter 2 is great, including the discussion on how to create your own data type. As with most of the mini-books, there are a few mundane discussions such as the one on creating classes, but even here, the authors provide some great information on working with class diagrams. This mini-book also includes essays on IntelliSense and productivity aids such as FxCop. I can’t really discuss every topic you’ll find in this mini-book to any level of detail, but even professionals will like the discussions of exception handling and application testing.

The Going the Extra Mile mini-book is a bit confusing. The authors begin with a discussion of solutions and projects—I would have expected something like this far earlier in the book, such as when the reader is learning to build applications. The second chapter does have a useful discussion on deployment. In the third chapter you find a discussion of source control and the fourth chapter describes how to work with Crystal Reports, which probably should have been discussed as part of working with databases. Overall, this mini-book has the feel of a repository for information that the authors just couldn’t stick in somewhere else.

The Extending Visual Studio mini-book is one where the novice need not apply. I felt that this was the mini-book that the authors intended for the intermediate (or above) developer. You come across all kinds of interesting topics, such as how to extend Visual Studio to meet specific needs and working with the team components of Visual Studio. You also find a very short overview of using Visual Studio to work with Office 2007, which is another one of those topics that the authors probably should have skipped in favor of providing in depth information in another area.

Is this a good book?

This is a great book if you’re learning Visual Studio 2008 for the first time. Even long time Visual Studio developers can turn up something new about Visual Studio 2008 by skimming the book or using it as a reference, but the authors obviously designed the book for the developer who wants to learn all of the ins and outs of basic Visual Studio usage. Make no mistake, this isn’t a language book—if you want to learn C# or Visual Basic.NET, you need to obtain a language-specific book.

It would be immensely difficult to cover every topic in detail in a single book. The authors mainly focus their attention on mainstream topics that all developers need to know and avoid the topics that may not have as much appeal. For example, the authors do mention Language INtegrated Query (LINQ), but you only find six pages on the topic, which isn’t even enough material for a good article. Let’s just say that you’ll have an idea of what LINQ is, but you won’t be able to use it effectively after reading this book—better find a LINQ specific book.

The part I like best about this book is that the authors could have trod the ground covered by every other Visual Studio book on the market, but they chose not to do so. This book contains some truly useful and interesting topics that you probably won’t find anywhere else. The individual mini-book reviews point you to topics of interest in each mini-book. Use these topics as your reason to buy the book because I think you’ll find that they really do make the difference between an average and a good book. This book definitely falls into the good category despite the warts I discovered during the review.

Visual Studio 2008 All-in-One Desk Reference for Dummies has a couple of potential problems that aren’t the authors’ faults. The first is that the book uses SQL Server 2005 as the database server. The SQL Server 2008 RTM has come out since this book was released, which means that you won’t find any SQL Server 2008 goodies in this book. You can learn about the new SQL Server 2008 features at http://www.microsoft.com/sqlserver/2008/en/us/overview.aspx.

The second problem is that the book doesn’t provide any coverage of Service Pack 1 (SP1), which also came out after the book’s release. SP1 provides a number of interesting new features, including the SQL Server 2008 support that most developers will need. You can read about the SP1 improvements at http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/vstudio/products/cc533447.aspx.

BIO

John Mueller is a freelance author and technical editor. He has writing in his blood, having produced 81 books and over 300 articles to date. The topics range from networking to artificial intelligence and from database management to heads down programming. His current project is LINQ for Dummies (available now), which you can order at http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/ASIN/0470277947/datacservip0f-20/. His technical editing skills have helped over 58 authors refine the content of their manuscripts. You can reach John on the Internet at JMueller@mwt.net and his Web site at: http://www.mwt.net/~jmueller/.