Books for/about - Visual Studio 2005

Programming SQL Server 2005

Publisher: O'Reilly Media
Authors: Bill Hamilton

ISBN: 0596004796
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Summary: Learning SQL Server 2005
'Programming SQL Server 2005' by Bill Hamilton is a nice book, but the title is a bit misleading (in a sense). When it says '2005', this books MEANS 2005. For a book that says "Programming" in the title, I would expect a thorough examination of discussing the old AND new of SQL Server, but this text decides to focus on the new gadgets and abilities that the 2005 generation provides, without focussing specifically on the existing programming features/abilities.

At nearly 600 pages this book sounds like it's a good amount of material, but for any book that says programming and with a topic so diverse, I would expect more.

If you are looking to find out more about what SQL Server 2005 provides, create some applications that talk to your database server using the Visual Studio 2005 suite and get up to speed, this is a nice resource, but I cannot give it 5 stars as it just doesn't jump off the page for me like I would have hoped.

**** RECOMMENDED

Summary: Very Informative and Easy to Read
This book is an easy-to-read tutorial on many of the new features of SQL Server 2005. It covers the expected topics, such as T-SQL Enhancements, HTTP Endpoints (Web Services), CLR Integration, and the XML data type. I was pleased to discover, however, that it also does a good job of explaining the often left-out features such as SQL Server Management Objects (SMO), SQL Server Integration Services (SSIS), and Analysis Services. (There are three chapters on SMO alone!) There is even a chapter on using SMO to program the SQL Server Agent service. That's an extra that I haven't seen before.

One of the things that I really liked about this book was the writing style. Reading it didn't feel like a chore. I wound up reading a bit of it each night after work, in order to relax. This is fairly unusual for me, as I typically get more than enough exposure to SQL during the day.

I was quite pleased with this book. I am a Microsoft Certified Trainer, and have been teaching classes on SQL Server 2005 for over a year. Therefore, I've seen numerous books and classes on SQL 2005. In my mind, this book stands out from the pack.

Summary: Must-have book!
This book provides a clear, concise walkthrough about programming all aspects of SQL Server 2005. Numerous code samples are included that can be downloaded from the O'Reilly web site. The book contains excellent coverage of programming CLR routines, XML support, native Web services support, and SQL Server Management Objects (SMO) (which replaces DMO). I also found the sections about topics such as Notification Services, replication, Reporting Services, and Integration Services helpful. These topics are new to me and I now both understand them and have been able to program solutions.

As a previous reviewer correctly mentioned, this book only covers new T-SQL features. I actually prefer this since I already know T-SQL (and there are already a lot of good T-SQL books available). The coverage of new T-SQL features is complete and the examples are good.

This book includes an appendix that explains the new features of ADO.NET 2.0. The writing and examples are clear and helped me understand the changes and enhancements. It's great that the author chose to include this since programming ADO.NET 2.0 is related to programming SQL Server 2005 but not the same thing at all.

Finally, I really like that this book does not simply recycle MSDN content, but rather complements it. There is enough reference material in the book to support the discussion and examples. After reading the book, you'll know enough about programming SQL Server 2005 to quickly find any reference material that you need in MSDN.

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Professional Visual Studio 2005 Team System (Programmer to Programmer)

Publisher: Wrox
Authors: Jean-Luc David Tony Loton Erik Gunvaldson Christopher Bowen Noah Coad Darren Jefford

ISBN: 0764584367
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Summary: A Big Book on a Big Software System
Big software systems such as an operating system, a database, or an integrated business package have grown where they cannot be the product of a single individual. Hence programming teams have been forced to develop. Teams have been forced to further divide into specialties such as architect, developer and tester. With all this has come the problems associated with integrating the output of the members of the team who may well be geographically dispersed (Did anybody mention India?) and may have communications difficulties.

Microsoft's answer to this is the Visual Studio Team System. It's a quite sophisticated system for the record keeping and organizating of a team programming system. Neither the software nor this book is aimed at the complete beginner who has other problems rather than team efforts.

This is one of Wrox's Programmer to Programmer books. It is written by professionals with a view to its use by other professionals.

The one complaint I have, and it's a complaint about the software, not about the book, is that this software system is very Microsoft dependent. Microsoft wants to supply all the system you have on your computers, so instead of standards like UML, Microsoft has re-invented the wheel to use their own technology.

This is a big book, about a big software package. If Visual Studio Team System is what you have decided (or been told) to use, this book is an excellent place to start.

Summary: Deep-dive technical usage on implementing and maximizing VSTS
This is the book for leverage the power of VSTS. It covers setup and install of VSTS, specific Visual Studio tool enhancements, implementing methodology, extensibility, and overall team integration.

Each of the authors are experts in specific technologies/methodologies that VSTS addresses and they take you through the insides of all the major components of VSTS.

- Sam Guckenheimer's book "Software Engineering with Microsoft Visual Studio Team System" is focused on software engineering and project management using VSTS.

- Richard Hundhausen's "Working with Microsoft Visual Studio 2005 Team System" is an introduction to "What is Team System?"

This book is the technical ins and outs of Team System.

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	Learning C# 2005: Get Started with C# 2.0 and .NET Programming (2nd Edition) Publisher: O'Reilly Media Authors: Jesse Liberty Brian MacDonald
ISBN: 0596102097 List Price: $39.99 Amazon Price: $25.19 Usually ships in 24 hours Buy this book from amazon.com or from amazon.co.uk	Avg Cusomer Rating: 5 Reviews: Summary: a suberb C# primer for novice object-oriented programmers Excerpt from C# Online.NET Review (wiki.CSharp-Online.NET): "This is somewhat of a rare C# book: it is designed specifically to educate the novice programmer and those with little or no Object-Oriented Programming (OOP) under their belts. And, it succeeds admirably in its mission.... The focus of the book is C# fundamentals and OO basics." BTW I have noticed that some people have reviewed the wrong book here: this is the 2nd edition: it does have exercises. Summary: Jesse Liberty and Brian MacDonald pull it together nicely! I am a Visual Basic 6 programmer and I have been set it my ways. I figured I could have started at the next level up but something nagged me to start at the begining. I am happy I started with this book and my next book will be by this author. This book is well crafted and has reintroduced topics to me that has bid me a better understanding of complex subjects in a way that just clicked for me. This book has even taught me things about the if statement that I didn't even realize were happening. "short circuiting" The knowledge of the langauge by the authors is unquestionable. The thoroughness of the lessons is supperior. I recommend this book highly. The complaint I have is the examples in the book are boring. That is the reason for the 4 star review. Summary: Excellent intro to C# Let me just start out by saying how impressed I was with this book. This is an excellent introduction to not only C# and the .NET framework, but it's an excellent introduction to object-oriented design. I found this book to be an excellent way for beginning programmers to easily enter the world of .NET. The book begins with an very brief introduction to C# and C# fundamentals. Again, this discussion is geared for the novice to intermediate programmer, so there's nothing too scary here. The Visual Studio IDE is discussed and a quick tutorial into the various menus and options available in the IDE is presented. After these introductory chapters, the authors dive right in to operators (like + and /), but also more complicated operations like modulus. The authors then proceed to discuss virtually everything you need to know to create a sophisticated program. The book has been updated to incorporate information about the latest .NET release (version 2.0), with a discussion on Generics. In typical O'Reilly fashion, tips, tricks, and things to watch out for are clearly identified in the text. But this book goes a step beyond and includes a quiz at the end of each chapter. This quiz covers the major points of the chapter and includes the correct answers at the end of the book. I thought this was an excellent step in helping programmers new to C# (or even .NET) an excellent way to test their skills and comprehension. I absolutely love this book. It's a great introduction to C# and .NET, it's easy to follow, and it's easy to test your comprehension. If you're looking for a great book for the beginning to intermediate developer, I would highly recommend this one. Summary:

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C# Cookbook, 2nd Edition (Cookbooks (O'Reilly))

Publisher: O'Reilly Media
Authors: Jay Hilyard Stephen Teilhet

ISBN: 0596100639
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Summary: This book saved my life - multiple times!
I actually bought the first edition of the book and I loved it so much that I am getting the second edition. There were several times that I needed a quick tip or trick on how to solve a problem and I found the answer here. Excellent use of your money.

Summary: ONE OF THE BEST
This is the only book that even mentions "closures". I have all the C# 2005 books by "Troelsen", Wrox book, Microsoft's "Visual C# The Language", etc. and none of them talk about "closures".
This is a good book!!

Summary: Fine Recipes for "Well Done" Code
I use O'Reilly's cookbooks for two purposes; first to find out ways to do task at hand in a better way and second to explore the feature set a programming language has to offer. From a developer's mindset an annotated reference to a programming language may not be much helpful as compared to seeing code-in-action. I can read all about observer design pattern and the file system watcher class but having an code segment showing the implementation is priceless; so is "Replacing the stack and queue with their generic counter parts", spiffy eh?

The book is well done and authors have covered a whole lot in over 1100 pages including threading, unsafe code, XML, networking, delegates and regular expression recipes. My favorite recipe as a language features creep would be 9.15, "Using Closures in C#". (Closure is a function that refers to free variables in its lexical context).

Having said that, I'm missing things like SOAP extensions, serialization and small nitpick http request / response spoofing techniques in there which us developers do much often and hence the 4 stars. But if you are working with C# and want something more than a Google search (for instance knowing that secure strings won't work unless you have Win2K sp3 or higher), buying this book would be a wise thing to do.

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Pro Visual Studio 2005 Team System

Publisher: Apress
Authors: Jeff Levinson David Nelson

ISBN: 1590594606
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Summary: Great Book on TFS and VSTS !
There is very little WRITTEN documentation on Team Foundation Server. This book tells you how to set it up and how it works in relation so Visual Studio Team System. This is the best doc I've seen out there. A must buy !

Summary: Great Book!
This book describes, in great detail, how to work with Visual StudioTeam System. It is broken up into logical sections which lay out who has what responsibility and how they would perform their work with this tool. It covers a lot of detail but presents the information in a way that the lay person could read it and understand it as well.

The book is broken up into 4 sections:

1. Team Foundation Server
This section explains the workflow process in VSTS, work items,project management, version control, reporting and Team Build. These sections show you how to customize the workflow, work items and reports. The section on project management gives the view of the application from the PM's and stakeholders perspective. The team build section describes how to automate builds and publish build results - very cool.

2. Edition for Software Architects
This section discusses the designers in great detail and explains how they can be used in an enterprise environment. This section really shows that the authors are architects in an true enterprise environment and should benefit others in this environment.

3. Edition for Software Developers
This section covers those features that will really help developers - Unit Testing, Performance Testing, Static Code Analysis (for managed and non-managed code). This was an incredibly beneficial section and describes how to extent most of the test types (with the exception of generic testing). It also includes a great section on data driven testing and best practices.

4. Edition for Software Testers
This covers web testing and load testing. It also covers the full extensibility of the various test types and the options for using the test tools as well as a couple of undocumented features. It alsocovers test case management.

Overall, this is an excellent book and will remain a reference on my desk for a long while to come.

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	Programming C# with Visual Studio .Net 2005 Publisher: Lulu Press Authors: Jeffery Suddeth
ISBN: 1411664477 List Price: $35.18 Amazon Price: $35.18 Usually ships in 24 hours Buy this book from amazon.com or from amazon.co.uk	Avg Cusomer Rating: 5 Reviews: Summary: Very good entry level C# book If you have time, you should make a list of those books that you are interested and go to a bigger book store to see if you like the content and layout of them. It's safer~ But I couldn't find this book in two book store I went. Based on the review here I bought this book. And I am really happy that I bought it! I just finished this book and found it very easy to read and understand without having way too much explanation that get you confused like some other books do. Highly recommend! Summary: right on the mark I'm on chapter 8 and totally enjoying this book. He did a Great job! It's totally on the mark. FWIW, I'm an experienced developer but new to C# and Visual Studio and while I have a fairly huge collection of books (because I live in a small town in Alaska and you can't check things out before you buy nor run down to your local book/computer store to pickup a reference) this is one of the few programming books I'm ever likely to read cover to cover. There are a few typos/errors, but they're readily discernable from the text and aren't likely to mislead you if you're paying attention to context. Summary: A Good Solid Tutorial Approach to C# Problem: Someone came by and was willing to pay a rather large amount of money for a project but insisted on C#. Like the old joke, we know what we are, we just quibble about the price. OK, so now I need to know C#, and I need to know it quickly. The solution to that problem (regardless of the language) is really simple - a trip to the bookstore. I bought three different books on C#. I often do this, as just looking them over in the store may be misleading. I took all three, and started reading in each of them. I usually find that I then begin to concentrate my time on one of the books. I started on this one last - visually it's kind of dull. On the other hand, by page 9 I was typing in a short program. By Golly, it worked. It didn't do much, just printed a line of text, but I had a program running. That way I was able to prove that the installation of the software was working, I could see a bit of the basic C# structure, and it printed something. There are really only four things that a program does I/O, logic, arithmetic, and data storage. In only a few minutes I had done at least a simple output. This new book covers the latest version of C#, Visual Studio and the .NET framework. It took me about a week to go through the book, the next week I read the other two books and got some very good ideas just from from the fact that they worded things differently. When I got started on the gig, I could hold my own with the other C# programmers. And that's all you can possibly ask of a book. This was not my first programming language. I've worked in at least a dozen languages over the years, maybe two dozen. I don't know if I would pick this book for the complete beginner unless it was for a class where the instructor could provide some additional direction. On the other hand, when I was a complete beginner they handed me an assembly language programming book and told me to go read it (This was long, long ago when the world was still flat). This book is a hell of a lot easier than the way I started. Summary:

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Visual Studio Tools for Office: Using Visual Basic 2005 with Excel, Word, Outlook, and InfoPath (Microsoft .Net Development)

Publisher: Addison-Wesley Professional
Authors: Eric Carter Eric Lippert

ISBN: 0321411757
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Summary: powerful integration of Visual Studio and MS Office
Carter and Lippert demonstrate one of the key reasons for Microsoft's continued success over almost 30 years. From its inception, Microsoft was a tool developer, writing and selling compilers and other programming aids to programmers. In similar wise, developers who wish to extend Microsoft Office applications will be pleased by the depth of detail shown in the book. Visual Studio is the IDE that gives you a comfortable and powerful platform.

The book is rather lengthy. Few readers will likely scan it end to end. But the main reason for the heft is the number of applications within the Office suite. Excel gets 4 chapters, and so does Word. While Outlook has 3 chapters and InfoPath has one. Of these applications, it is perhaps Excel that is the most likely to be extended by third party developers. A spreadsheet is something that inherently lends itself to the idea that someone would write more intricate relations. Given that the default mode is for a user to associate cells in some formulaic fashion.

It should also be said that there are several other chapters, mostly concerned with the overall aspects of programming within VSTO. Speaking of which, there is a nice passage showing how to tie an Excel spreadsheet back to a SQL database, through the use of Binding Sources. This takes what is essentially the UI coding of the MS Office applications to a deeper level.

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Visual Basic 2005 (In a Nutshell (O'Reilly))

Publisher: O'Reilly Media
Authors: Tim Patrick Paul Lomax Ron Petrusha Steven Roman

ISBN: 059610152X
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Summary: Fantastic Desktop Reference
Visual Basic 2005 In A Nutshell is a wonderful companion reference for any and all VB developers. With the new features in the 2005 version of VB, this guide is a great book to have by your side when you are working on your latest Visual Basic application.

Packed with nearly 750 pages of reference material, this is a great books that is written well, without too much bloat (just the way I like it). The first 150 pages cover the basics of using the VB language, the next 300 is reference for keywords, classes, functions, etc, and the 300 page or so covers the 'My' reference (VERY IMPORTANT) and other odds and ends of the language.

I love the Nutshell books because they cut through the muck and get right to the point. The size of the books make them perfect for keeping by your side, and that familiar brown coloring scheme makes them easy to see on your shelf.

If you program VB, pick this book up, it will truly make your life easier!

***** HIGHLY RECOMMENDED

Summary: Clear and concise with great examples
This is a fantastic reference book for VB prorgrammers. The examples are great. They aren't too long and get right to the point of what they are trying to illustrate. The organization is perfect and the writing is crisp.

It's hard to compete with the convenience of the MSDN. But sometimes the MSDN is tough to navigate and it's just easier to pick up a book and find what you are looking for. And the book you pick up should be this book.

Summary: A Very Good Book
I've always missed the printed help manuals that used to come with development tools. I used to carry them around with me and browse through them whenever I had a bit of time. So I was happy to read this book, which has a nice big PRINTED reference section. There are several sections that cover various topics such as object orientation, data types, delegates & events, operators, and so on. The book also covers the new features of Visual Basic 2005, such as operator overloading and generics. My favorite part is the section on the My namespace. Cool stuff.

This is mainly a reference book. The authors did a very good job of also making this a readable book. That's a rare feat.

Bottom line: this book is a keeper, and will be sitting on my bookshelf at work.

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