Category: books

I was recently given an eBook copy of Peter Ritchie’s new book, Visual Studio 2010 Best Practices, to review. I was excited to receive a copy because it was a title I had been planning to buy anyway. After reading it, I may order a print copy to keep within reach.

When I first read the title, I wondered why they were publishing a Visual Studio 2010 book right before the launch of Visual Studio 2012. I hope this does not turn off any potential customers because the majority of the recommendations Ritchie gives in the book apply to development with both VS 2010 and 2012. And contrary to the book’s title, he doesn’t like to call them best practices.

I call them "recommended practices" instead of "best practices." The superlative "best" implies some degree of completeness. In almost all circumstances, the completeness of these practices has a shelf-life. Some best practices have a very small shelf-life due to the degree to which technology and our knowledge of it changes.

While this is not an introduction to Visual Studio or the .NET Framework, most Visual Studio developers should find this book useful. Those who are less experienced with .NET will be able to take these recommended practices to get into the world of .NET on the right foot. Even those developers who consider themselves experts in Visual Studio will probably find some new nuggets of wisdom.

The practices discussed in the book range from architecture to C# language features to toolsets. Each recommendation is discussed with examples and then distilled down to two statements, a Context and a Practice. Here’s an example around data transfer and messaging:

Context: When dealing with data that needs to be actioned independently and asynchronously.
Practice: Consider command classes.

I enjoyed reading Visual Studio 2010 Best Practices. I recommend reading it cover-to-cover and then keeping it on hand as a reference guide.