Visual Studio 2010 Best Practices published

Most of my spare time in the last few months has been taken up by writing Visual Studio 2010 Best Practices. This has now been published and is available through publisher (no longer pre-order) at http://bit.ly/Px43Pw. The pre-order price is still available for a limited time. Amazon still has it out of stock; but $39.99 at**http://**amzn.to/QDDmF7.

The title of the book really doesn't do the content justice. Least of which is "Best Practices". Anyone who knows me should know I don't really like that term. But, hopefully those looking for best practices will read the book and learn from chapter one why "best practice" has problems.

While it's called "Visual Studio 2010 Best Practices" it isn't limited to the UI of Visual Studio (or Visual Studio 2010 really, for that matter). It's really a set of generally accepted recommended practices based on expertise and experience for any and all developers of .NET (it assumes they use Visual Studio–but many practices deal with general design/development that can be applied almost anywhere). There are some specifics in there about the Visual Studio UI like optimizing Visual Studio settings/configuration, useful features, the correct way to use certain features, etc. But, that's mostly limited to one chapter. Other chapters include recommended practices regarding C#, SCC, deployment, testing, parallelization/multithreading, distributed applications and web services. From the book overview:

Learning source code control
Practices for advanced C# syntax
Asynchronous programming in C#
Learn tips for architecting decoupled systems
Practices for designing multi-threaded and parallel systems
Practices for designing distributed systems
Learn better ways of developing web services with WCF
Learn faster ways to design automated tests
Tips and tricks to test complex systems
Understanding proven ways of deploying software systems in Windows

Kind of a mixed bag; but, you have to work within the bounds you've been given :). It was limited to about 200 pages; so, of course, I couldn't go into every recommended practice or every useful tidbit that everyone could use…

I'd like to thank a few people for helping-out outside of the publisher's review channel (i.e. they're not mentioned in the book): Joe Miller, Amir Barylko, and of course all those that offered…