VS 2010 Book Forewords
I was asked to write a few book forewords this year. I’ve included the contents below. I hope you will read the forewords and check out the books! I’ve also written past excerpts for Microsoft Visual Studio Tips by Sara Ford and Visual Basic 2008 - Neue Technologien – Crashkurs by Klaus Löffelmann. For more VS 2010 books, see my previous blog post.
.NET Windows Development: Everyday Tips, Tricks & Optimization
by Alberto Población
Buy the Book on Amazon:
https://www.amazon.com/NET-Windows-Development-Everyday-Optimization/dp/8493548936
Foreword:
The .NET Framework contains thousands of libraries to help you with just about any modern development task. Whether you are accessing data, creating a user interface, consuming a web service, or parallelizing your application, the .NET Framework has libraries that can help. The challenge for a .NET developer is to learn what types are available, how to use them, and when. This book provides tried and tested solutions to a variety of common .NET development scenarios.
This book focuses on Windows development. With over a billion clients in the world, Windows is by far the most-used platform. Windows 7, in particular, is the fastest growing and most popular release of Windows yet. See the Windows 7 chapter in this book to learn how your applications can light up on this huge, growing platform. Furthermore, many tips you will find in this book are also relevant to other .NET application types, in addition to Windows client.
The Most Valuable Professional (MVP) Program honors Microsoft technology experts for their impact in the community. As a Visual Studio Community Program Manager, I have the opportunity to interact with many customers, and in particular with members of this program. We are fortunate to have Alberto Población as a C# MVP. He has been recognized because of his impact in teaching others about .NET development, both as a trainer and as a top answerer in the newsgroups and forums.
“Tips and Tricks” content is popular because of its immediate practical use. It is also highly personal, based on the author’s experience and prioritization. Alberto’s selections in this book draw on nearly 30 years of development, and respond to the top questions raised in his interactions with .NET users. Reading this book will help you expand your toolset, complete tasks more quickly, and write better and more resilient code. Alberto’s writing style is easy to follow and engaging to read. You can keep this book on your shelf as a reference or read it cover to cover as you would a novel.
So pack this guide with you, give it a read, and add some new tips to your toolbox!
Lisa Feigenbaum
Community Program Manager
Microsoft Visual Studio
Microsoft Visual Basic 2010 - Das Entwicklerbuch - Grundlagen, Techniken, Profi-Know-how
by Klaus Löffelmann and Sarika Calla
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German Book for sale:
https://www.microsoft-press.de/product.asp?cat0=33&idx0=12&gr=bücher&cat1=750001464&idx1=2&cnt=product&id=ms-5535&lng=0&titel=Microsoft Visual Basic 2010 - Das Entwicklerbuch
Table of Contents and Foreword in German:
https://www.microsoft-press.de/productinfo.asp?replace=false&cnt=productinfo&mode=2&type=2&id=ms-5535&index=1&nr=0&preload=false&page=1&view=fit&Toolbar=1&pagemode=none
English Version of the Book on Amazon (not yet released):
https://www.amazon.com/Microsoft-Visual-Basic-Developers-Handbook/dp/0735627053
Foreword (in English):
Visual Studio 2010 is an exciting version for the Visual Basic language, which reaches double digits in Visual Basic 10. This is a phenomenal achievement for a programming language, and it demonstrates the great utility that the language continues to provide year after year. Visual Basic has always been a premier tool for making Microsoft platforms accessible and easy to use. While the specific technologies and devices have changed over time, this core mission of Visual Basic has remained the same. Starting in 1991 with Visual Basic 1 and continuing through to Visual Basic 3, Visual Basic revolutionized Windows application development by making it accessible in a way that wasn’t possible before. Moving forward to Visual Basic 4 through Visual Basic 6, the language greatly simplified component programming with COM, OLE automation, and ActiveX. Finally, with Visual Basic 7 and beyond, the language has enabled developers to leverage the Common Language Runtime (CLR) and many .NET Framework technologies. This book covers examples of this, using Visual Basic to access .NET Framework data types, Language Integrated Query (LINQ), Windows Presentation Foundation (WPF), and the Task Parallel Library. LINQ in particular has a significant impact on the language, providing a unified way to access data from objects, XML, or relational data sources. One of the most revolutionary features introduced as part of LINQ is XML literals, which makes Visual Basic the most productive language for programming with XML.
Looking ahead, there are three major development trends that we see influencing the Visual Basic language now and in the future: declarative, dynamic, and concurrent programming. Declarative programming enables the developer to state what the program should do, rather than requiring the developer to specify in great detail how the compiler should do it. This has always been a design principle for Visual Basic, in which we strive to increase the expressiveness of the language so you can “say more with less code”. Some recent examples of this in Visual Basic 9 are LINQ and type inference. Visual Basic 10 introduces similar efficiencies with multiline lambdas, array literals, collection initializers, auto-implemented properties, and implicit line continuation – all of which are covered in this book. Dynamic programming is another style that has influenced the design of Visual Basic. Late binding is an important feature that has made Visual Basic a great language for Office development and COM programming. In Visual Basic 10, we extended Visual Basic’s late-binding support to work with other dynamic type environments, such as JavaScript and IronPython. This was made possible by the Dynamic Language Runtime (DLR), which was introduced in .NET Framework 4. Finally, concurrency is an undeniable trend that we see influencing many forms of development. Whether your application is running on a many-core machine, a clustered environment on premises, via distributed computing in the cloud, or even on a single core machine doing IO-bound operations, concurrency can help speed up its execution. .NET Framework 4 provides some great tools for concurrent programming, such as the Task Parallel Library and Parallel LINQ. Part F of this book shows how to use these technologies in Visual Basic.
Visual Basic is a vibrant environment, and we invite you to dive into it in Visual Studio 2010! Whether you’ve used previous versions of Visual Basic or other object-oriented programming (OOP) languages, or are new to OOP altogether, this book has the information you need to quickly become productive. It explains programming concepts, Visual Basic, Visual Studio, and the .NET Framework from the bottom up, and establishes a strong foundation. For the more experienced reader, this book also goes deep into these topics and includes dedicated sections on what’s new in the 2010 release of Visual Studio. The book covers a variety of topics, some of them technology specific (like WPF), while others are application agnostic (like garbage collection and serialization). This book establishes a solid foundation that you can leverage when developing applications for any platform that Visual Studio 2010 targets, such as SharePoint, the web, and the cloud.
As Visual Studio Community Program Manager, I always enjoy meeting members of the Visual Studio community. One of the first times Klaus wrote to me, he quoted a motto he had learned from his grandmother: “the worst attempt is the one that you’ll never make.” I knew at that point that he was an ambitious person! Klaus has written computer books for over 20 years, on Commodore 16, Commodore 64, Commodore 128, Atari ST, Amiga, Visual Basic 1[MA1] , Visual Basic 3, Visual Basic 4, Visual Basic 5, Visual Basic 6, Visual Studio 2003, Visual Studio 2005, Visual Studio 2008, and now Visual Studio 2010. I’ve met with Klaus in various cities around the world: Antwerp, Berlin, and Seattle. His first trip to Seattle was for the Microsoft Most Valuable Professional (MVP) Summit. The MVP Program honors Microsoft technology experts for their impact in the community, and Klaus was recognized as a Visual Basic MVP for the great support he’s provided through writing books, delivering webcasts, and reviewing German content on MSDN. Klaus’s took his second trip to Seattle while writing this book. He found great inspiration in being at the place where “the magic happens.” I took Klaus on a tour through the Microsoft offices, where he got to connect with other members of the Visual Basic product team. It was a really exciting visit and I could see how passionate Klaus is about Visual Basic!
I was happy to connect Klaus with Sarika, who has been a great partner in writing this book. As a Test Lead on the Microsoft Visual Studio Professional team, Sarika has extensive expertise in Visual Studio. Sarika joined the team in 2002, and has worked on the Visual Studio 2003, Visual Studio 2005, Visual Studio 2008, and Visual Studio 2010 releases. During this time, she’s been deeply involved in the evolution of the Visual Basic language and IDE. As Test Lead, Sarika spends a lot of time thinking about how Visual Basic developers use Visual Studio and the .NET Framework to create client, web, and other types of applications. She also interacts with the Visual Basic community at various phases of the product cycle to gather feedback, review bugs, and present to customers.
Sarika’s and Klaus’s backgrounds were key assets in writing this well thought out book. Sarika has spent nearly a decade working on the Visual Studio IDE, which was a significant area of investment in this release. The Visual Studio 2010 user interface was re-written in Windows Presentation Foundation, which enabled richer user experiences in Visual Studio itself, as well as greater extensibility capabilities for 3rd-party add-ins. Sarika shares her insight on this topic in the “sightseeing tour” of the Visual Studio 2010 IDE in Chapter 4. Klaus’s experience draws from many years of work as a consultant on Visual Basic .NET and Visual Basic 6 migrations. He’s worked with many development teams on a variety of projects, and he knows which concepts can be the most challenging for developers to pick up. He has a true passion for compiling the most useful information for his readers and presenting it in a way that’s easy to understand. While writing a book can be an arduous task, Klaus tackles it with enthusiasm. He has a great sense of humor that shines through in the playful writing style and makes it fun to follow along.
So as Klaus’s grandma would advise, give this book a try! I’m sure you will find that the 10th version of Visual Basic helps you to tackle your software development projects with greater ease and productivity than ever before.
Lisa Feigenbaum
Community Program Manager
Microsoft Visual Studio