Book Review – Visual Studio 2012 and .NET 4.5 Expert Development Cookbook

Recently one of my good friends, Abhishek Sur (Microsoft MVP, Client App Dev) has published a book named “Visual Studio 2012 and .NET 4.5 Expert Development Cookbook” and published from Packt, a leading publishing website. This book covers various components of Visual Studio 2012 IDE and several easy to remember solutions (rather Recipes in terms of the book) for developers working on .NET, ASP.NET, WPF, Windows 8 Apps and other Microsoft technologies. I got the chance to read this book a while ago and this post details my thoughts about the book.

Summary

In simple words, a nicely written book covering aspects in a logical manner. Once you start reading the book, you learn more than expected. The book starts explaining your favorite IDE Visual Studio 2012 making you feel comfortable with it and then explains memory management and asynchronous programming in a very easy to understand language. The book illustrates each function as a “How To” question answer approach that every developer will find easy to read. As you go ahead reading the book, you learn new techniques and enhancements for WPF, ASP.NET, Windows 8 Store Apps. The book comprises 7 chapters with each chapter focusing on one technology and giving you answers to many questions related to the technology.

About the Author

Abhishek Sur is a Microsoft MVP in Client App Dev since 2011. He is an architect in the .NET platform. He has profound theoretical insight and years of hands on experience in different .NET products and languages. His website abhisheksur.com guides both budding and experienced developers to understand the details of languages and latest technologies.

Who is This Book For?

This book is aimed at any Visual Studio 2012 and .NET developers who want to gain advanced understanding on the technology and sharpen their existing skill sets and adapt to new .NET technologies. This book is good for any developer willing to learn new cutting edge Microsoft technologies.

Conclusion

To conclude, I will suggest this book to every .NET developer interested to dive deep in technology aspects and advance understanding. If you are a fresher or junior programmer, you might find the second and third chapter a bit tough to understand, but you can definitely utilize this book to learn new technologies. Few important points on why should you read this book:

• The book explains how to increase productivity of development using a common set of tools and features present inside the IDE.
• The book has detailed explanation on memory management and related techniques.
• New Threading Patterns and performance boosters available in .NET 4.5 and VS 2012 with ASP.NET.
• The book also an introduction to the latest enhancements of ASP.NET 4.5 with HTML5 and jQuery.
• The book introduces the enhancements to WPF 4.5 and the major components of WPF along with MVVM architechture.
• The book introduces the new programming model for developing Windows 8 style tiles application and also focuses on how to implement network-enabled applications in Windows 8.

Hope you like reading the book.