Scathing because this book is almost as hawwt as myself!!

Let’s not kid ourselves – the vast majority of my audience does not care about the content of this review.

• 55% of you are slavering James Avery fanboys who would buy anything that he writes, whether it be software development books, Mr. Men books, erotica, or even Mr. Men erotica featuring Mr. and Little Miss Visual Studio.*
  
• 42% of you are so enraptured with any recommendation I give that you’ve already gone to Amazon and bought this book based on the first sentence of my post.
• For the remaining 3% of you who actually want a criticial eye, here you are:

*Not* the same James Avery who wrote this book, but would that not have been *amazing* if he had?

One of the perks of being part of the Edmonton .NET User Group executive is that I get to review various technical material sent to us. I was lucky enough that the first book we received was O'Reilly's “Visual Studio Hacks” (ISBN 0-596-00847-3) by James Avery .

There are books that are considered to be “definitive” for a particular programming language (for example, Dino Esposito’s Programming ASP.NET, or the O’Reilly “Rhino” book on Javascript).  This book is the definitive book for the Visual Studio IDE.

The book covers many different aspects of the Visual Studio IDE, from simple shortcut keys that most people might be unaware of to add-ins like TestDriven.NET that can potentially change the way you do software development, period. I am pretty confident in saying that no matter what your level of familiarity with Visual Studio, you will definitely get some value and knowledge that you didn’t get before – I mean, there are 100 separate tips/tools in this book.

The good:

• Out of 100 hacks, none of them is worthless
• Pretty much every essential tool is covered
• The DTE and macro sections alone are worth the price of the book

The bad:

• The Regulator is passed over in favor of James' regex tool because it operates outside the IDE, but last I checked that trait didn't stop NDoc from getting featured!  (Then again, it is James' book, he can do what he wants).
• I would've liked a shout out to the crew of Fresh Prince of Bel-Air.  Don't forget where you came from, James!!!

The mildly disturbing:

• If there is a more blatant phallic symbol on the cover of any O’Reilly book, I defy you to find it.

With that uncomfortableness out of the way, a brief explanation of the positive end of the Justice Gray rating scale:

• A glance – Somewhat intruiging at a distance but once you get closer you realize it looked better from afar
• A wink – Still good looking up close but she's just met you and already talking about she feels like she's known you all of her life and wants to get married.
  
• A kiss – Even better but she definitely needs some breath mints before she gets any further.
• A kiss with tongue(!) – definitely a hot one, but there's a little *too* much slobber, which is keeping you from going…
• ALL THE WAY(~!) - You’re getting it on like Donkey Kong - whips, chains, llamas and all. You won’t respect her in the morning…hell, you won’t even respect yourself in the morning but who cares?  Some things are worth feeling used for your body alone!  You'll be going back again...and *again*!!  **
  

In closing, I would definitely say to get the fireplace and the Village People CD going because I would go ALL THE WAY with Visual Studio Hacks without reservation. Get your freak on today and order it here!