Learning Visual Studio Book Recommendations

In the comments to my last post Steven asked "Is there a "Dao of VS.NET and its IDE" book you'd recommend to hobbyist-programmers who're coming to VS.NET from Emacs, notepad, etc.?"

I've personally never read any of them, but I floated this request around internally and got a great reply back from Dan Fernandez.

"I personally really liked the concept of the Visual Blueprint series (available for C#, VB, and ASP.NET) which is a task-focused guide to Visual Studio .NET (take a look inside the book as it breaks down parts of the IDE). The reviews trashed the book with most of the comments saying how it wasn’t updated post VS beta. It’s great for the step-by-step, task focused and illustration heavy book though...

We have also tried out some interactive simulations (computer led and voice) that show how to create a Web service, Web app consuming the web service, and mobile Web app using VS 2003... For beta 1 we created a very basic Create Notepad in 12 minutes using C# Express that shows off the IDE, properties, refactoring, toolstrip, debugging, and more."

I hope Dan doesn't mind my republishing his mail.:-)