Book on Visual Studio 2005? (1 Viewer)

Hi,

Can anyone recommend a really good book on using Visual Studio 2005? I'd prefer something that gives coding examples in Visual Basic. However the key thing is how to use the IDE itself to automate many of the tasks in creating web apps or windows forms apps. Therefore it needs to have been completely written for VS 2005, not upgraded from 2003.

Nearly all the web guides I find focus on writing reams of code, even to instantiate controls on a form. But VS 2005 not only allows you to drag-and-drop controls and then set properties, but for instance you can drag a table from a data source onto a form, and instantly create a set of bound controls for the table's columns, with an Access-like Binding Navigator control to navigate through the records. Where is this feature documented? And how many other features like that are there? Without a good book to point them out, we could all waste countless hours hand-coding features that are available for free by simple drag-and-drop, or through the Properties window and other windows in the IDE.

I also feel like I'm having to work out from first principles, such things as creating reusable classes, creating MDI applications with multiple menus and toolbars, etc.

I'd really appreciate your reccommendations.

Thanks,
Keith.

A lot of the drag and drop things out there like table adapters generally break basic rules of coupling by bringing your DATA layer up to your presentation layer which is a big no no. They're great for proto-typing an application so you can say.. lets do this and it should do this and look like this in a basic sort of way.. then you sit down, model it out and build it the right way.

What most of us typically do is drop controls on the page like gridviews and treeview etc and work with them directly in code. Sometimes I can occassionly get away with using the objectdatasource control but not as much as before.

You'll also find that a lot books will tell you something similar.
here's some free e-books
http://www.apress.com/free/

Books by Francesco Balena and Dino Esposito are typically very good books as well.

Hi,

Thanks for your reply. I have downloaded the VB.NET book, which sounds really useful, and hope I will get a chance to read it soon!

I'm really reluctant to go down the road of writing lots of code, because of the maintenance overhead. I was hoping the Object data source might offer a route to separating data from the presentation layer, when I knew more about it. Can you explain why you don't use it "as much as before" - do you mean since transitioning from VS 2003 to VS 2005? Are there any fundamental principles I should adopt in order to write true object-oriented applications in VB.NET? I guess I should start with "don't use data sources on forms", but if you can't use an Object data source, surely you will still end up with high coupling between your forms and your database. Or writing an awful lot of lines of code to Get and Set values in a class object.

Would appreciate any pointers you can give, or further recommended reading.

Many thanks,
Keith.

Hi, Keith,

Bookwise, I second the Balena recommendation, though his .net books are written for people who have some prior knowledge of VB. If you have a fair amount of experience writing code using an OOP approach (a year or two or three or four), I would also look at Code Complete by Steve McConnell.

However, if you're new to OOP and .NET, browse Amazon.com and your favorite SUPER big bookstore until you find something that's mostly understandable to you. Many people, eager to learn this stuff, often make the mistake of prematurely diving into a book that is highly technical and jargon-rich -- they quickly find themselves drowning in an alphabet soup of turgid acronyms and abbreviations, which can be very discouraging...

Regards,
Tim

they quickly find themselves drowning

Click to expand...

Been there..
I actually got so tired of buying books that were not hitting on the points that I needed to wrap my head around that I just went to videos instead. Now those books make more sense.

http://www.microsoft.com/events/series/msdnwebdev.mspx
http://www.learn2asp.net/campaign.aspx?refID=cmp-01
http://www.learnvisualstudio.net

.NET is huge so once you get the concept of what .NET is all about, pick a topic to focus on and you'll branch out very quickly.

Hi,

Thanks for the further suggestions. I have a fair background in OOP, its just the practicalities of applying the principles in VB .NET.

I've certainly got some reading material (and videos) to work through now! After that maybe I'll tackle some application development!

Thanks,
Keith.

I was lookin' for a good book on VB.NET 2005 too a while ago.
Somebody advised me to be a WROX-book. I did some months ago. And for me this book was more then enough. Very well explained and just what I needed. I had vb program experience and learned about oo programming in school, so I didn't want to start from scratch.

I buyed this book in my local shop: http://www.wrox.com/WileyCDA/WroxTitle/productCd-0764575368.html
But they got several other books on diferent aspect of the .NET framework, just take a look here: http://www.wrox.com/WileyCDA/Section/id-105061.html

Hope this helps