Free ebook: Moving to Microsoft Visual Studio 2010 (DRAFT Preview II)

NEW: The complete and final ebook is now available here.

Hello. On March 26 we released the first draft installment of Moving to Microsoft Visual Studio 2010, which we’ll release as a free (and complete) ebook this summer. That installment contained the three chapters that make up Part II, “Moving from Microsoft Visual Studio 2005 to Visual Studio 2010.”

Today we’re happy to release a second draft installment: the three chapters that make up Part III, “Moving from Microsoft Visual Studio 2008 to Visual Studio 2010.”

You can download one or both free draft ebooks (in XPS or PDF format) here.

Here’s some of the Introduction, which explains the book’s approach:

Introduction

Every time we get close to a new release of Microsoft Visual Studio we can feel the excitement in the developer community. This release of Visual Studio is certainly no different, but at the same time we can feel a different vibe. In November 2009, at Microsoft Professional Developer Conference in Los Angeles, participants had the chance to get their hands on the latest beta of this Visual Studio incarnation. The developer community started to see how different this release is compared to any of its predecessors. This might sound familiar, but Visual Studio 2010 constitutes, in our opinion, a big leap and is a true game changer in that it has been designed and developed from the core up.

Looking at posts in the MSDN forums and many other popular developer communities also reveals that many of you—professional developers—are still working in previous versions of Visual Studio. This book will show you how to move to Visual Studio 2010 and will try to explain why it’s a great time to make this move.

Who Is This Book for?

This book is for professional developers who are working with previous versions of Visual Studio and are looking to make the move to Visual Studio 2010 Professional.

What Is the Book About?

The book is not a language primer, a language reference, or a single technology book. It’s a book that will help professional developers move from previous versions of Visual Studio (starting with 2003 and on up). It will cover the features of Visual Studio 2010 through an application. It will go through a lot of the exciting new language features and new versions of the most popular technologies without putting the emphasis on the technologies themselves. It will instead put the emphasis on how you would get to those new tools and features from Visual Studio 2010. If you are expecting this book to thoroughly cover the new Entity Framework or ASP.NET MVC 2, this is not the book for you. If you want to read a book where the focus is on Visual Studio 2010 and on the reasons for moving to Visual Studio 2010, this is the book for you.

How Will This Book Help Me Move to Visual Studio 2010?

This book will try to answer this question by using a practical approach and by going through the new features and characteristics of Visual Studio 2010 from your point of view—that is, from the view of someone using Visual Studio 2005, for example. To be consistent for all points of view and to cover the same topics from all points of view, we decided to build and use a real application that covers many areas of the product rather than show you many disjointed little samples. This application is named Plan My Night, and we’ll describe it in detail in this Introduction.

To help as many developers as we can, we decided to divide this book into three parts:

• Part I will be for developers moving from Visual Studio 2003
• Part II will be for developers moving from Visual Studio 2005
• Part III will be for developers moving from Visual Studio 2008

Each part will help developers understand how to use Visual Studio 2010 to create many different types of applications and unlock their creativity independently of the version they are using today. This book will be focusing on Visual Studio, but we’ll also cover many language features that make the move even more interesting.

Each part will follow a similar approach and will include these chapters:

• “Business Logic and Data”
• “Designing the Look and Feel”
• “Debugging the Application”

For example, Part I, “Moving from Microsoft Visual Studio 2003 to Visual Studio 2010,” includes a chapter called “From 2003 to 2010: Debugging the Application.” Likewise, Part II, “Moving from Microsoft Visual Studio 2005 to Visual Studio 2010,” includes a chapter called “From 2005 to 2010: Debugging the Application.”

Designing the Look and Feel

These chapters will focus on comparing how the creation of the user interface has evolved through the versions of Visual Studio. They pay attention to the design surface, the code editor, the tools, and the different controls, as well as compare UI validation methods. These chapters also tackle the topic of application extensibility.

Business Logic and Data

These chapters tackle how the application is structured and demonstrate the evolution of the tools and language features available to manage data. They describe the different application layers. They also show how the middle-tier is created across versions and how the application will manage caching the data as well as how to manage getting data in and from the database.

Debugging the Application

These chapters showcase the evolution of all developer aids and debugger tools as well as compare the different ways to improve the performance of an application. They also discuss the important task of unit-testing your code.

Deploying Plan My Night

Part I, for developers using Visual Studio 2003, also includes one extra chapter, “From 2003 to 2010: Deploying Plan My Night.” This chapter goes through the different ways to package, deploy, and deliver your application to your end users. The topic of updating and sending new bits to your customers is also discussed. We feel that Parts II and III, for developers using Visual Studio 2005 and Visual Studio 2008, didn’t require a chapter on deployment.