Best Kept Secrets in .NET

"Some books are just so good that I feel compelled to write about them. Deborah Kurata's Best Kept Secrets in .NET is one of those gems."

— William Ryan, KnowDotNet.com Team Member (Read the review here)

"The book's magic is that the tips are consolidated to within a single bound title, relieving the reader of needing to buy and read multiple titles to acquire such knowledge."

— Jason Salas, Microsoft MVP, ASP.NET (Read the review on Jason Salas' Weblog)

"I would really recommend that you have this near you when you code...so that you (can) start taking advantage of a lot of those shortcuts and best practices this book is filled with."

— Anand M., .NET From India (Read the review)

Author Deborah Kurata has spoken to .NET user groups all over America sharing her “Best Kept Secrets in .NET,” and she often hears experienced developers say, “I didn’t know you could do that with .NET!” This book is a collection of Deborah’s insights into .NET secrets that can enhance your productivity and code quality.

For example, did you know that you could manage code snippets in Visual Studio .NET? Have you ever tried the Incremental Search feature? Have you discovered the ErrorProvider control? Do you know how to short-circuit operators, alias data types, build regular expressions, or improve your type casting? Have you seen all of the database tools available from Server Explorer? Did you know that you could manage your database scripts within Solution Explorer and include your stored procedures under source code control? Have you tried expanding the capabilities of a dataset using ExtendedProperties? With all of the talk about agile methodologies and Extreme Programming, have you tried to build a test harness with .NET? How about deprecating your methods? This book covers these secrets and much more!

Deborah also presents a collection of very valuable but lesser-known features of Visual Studio and the .NET Framework. She provides detailed information about how you can use each of these hidden treasures to improve the efficiency of your software development process and the quality of the resulting software. Whether you are an experienced developer or you’re just getting started with .NET, this book will help you to be more productive, create better code, and produce superior software.

The primary goal of this book is to let you in on the secrets and hidden treasures that you can find discover in Visual Studio and the .NET Framework. If, as you read through this book, you say to yourself, “I didn’t know I could do that with .NET!” then this book has met its objective.