Zachmann.NET
Developer Education
For anyone who wants to get the most out of Visual Studio 2008, one of the best sources has been Microsoft developer/evangelist Zain Naboulsi's "Is This Thing On?" .NET developers’ blog and webcasts.
There was a time, not much more than a decade ago, when it was a real challenge for developers to get practical, down-to-earth information about how to use Microsoft Visual Studio.
Microsoft's official material, including most of the books from Microsoft Press, MSDN Magazine and so forth, was more about how things were meant to work than how they really did. More pragmatic treatments in books from third parties helped, but these materials often took a long time to appear in print.
Too Much Information
Today, the challenge is not the lack of information, but the overabundance of it. Blogs, podcasts, webcasts and more from Microsoft and others are so widely and so readily available that there are not enough hours in the day to absorb them all. The challenge for developers is to sort through everything and find the specific material that's most likely to be useful.
For anyone who wants to get the most out of Visual Studio 2008, one of the best sources has been Microsoft developer/evangelist Zain Naboulsi's "Is This Thing On?" .NET developers' blog and webcasts.
Visual Studio Visionary
If you're a .NET developer and don't already know Naboulsi, you really ought to. He shows a genuine enthusiasm for just about anything related to Visual Studio and Microsoft development. But he also has a breezy, informal, unpretentious way of approaching and presenting the material. It's far from the "party line" pitch we too often see from folks representing a hardware or software vendor.
Naboulsi is also typically running along the very edge of the Microsoft box. He charged into Web 2.0 social networking well ahead of most of his colleagues at Microsoft and has been a major influence in bringing Microsoft into Second Life. His Second Life avatar, named CSharp Writer, promises to lead Microsoft's developer evangelism program "to explore strange new worlds, to seek out new life and new civilizations, to boldly go where no Redmondian has gone before."
For an excellent first taste of the rich banquet of material for developers available on Naboulsi's blog, I highly recommend his May 22, 2008, webcast, "Creating Add-Ins with Visual Studio 2008." Available as a recorded Microsoft Live Meeting session, you can get the complete set of slides, projects and links directly from the blog site.
A Fine Introduction
Despite the title, this webcast is not limited only to Visual Studio add-ins, but covers the full range of ways in which Visual Studio 2008 can be modified and extended, including project and item templates, macros, shared add-ins, the Visual Studio Integration Package, the help integration wizard, the VS Shell-isolated and integrated -- and VS Tools for Applications. To enable the full range of these it's necessary to first download and install the Visual Studio SDK.
This one-hour presentation offers a great overview with numerous links and references to more detailed information. It puts the individual options in perspective with guidance on which are the most useful in what contexts and for what purposes.
But it's also a very good introduction to the much wider range of material available through the "Is This Thing On?" blog and the way that material's presented. Naboulsi is as prolific as he is enthusiastic, clearly enjoys his work and wants everyone to enjoy it with him. Why, he'll even invite you to gang up with him and some of his buddies in World of Warcraft if you like!
Other Information Sources
Two of Naboulsi's other webcasts you won't want to miss are "Overview of New Features in Visual Studio 2008" and "Overview of New Tools in Visual Studio 2008." And make a point to check out the nearly two dozen webcasts in the series called "Visual Studio and the .NET Framework 3.5: New Things." It'll give you a very comprehensive foundation for making the best possible use of Visual Studio 2008, and you'll almost certainly have fun doing it.
Today there's so much good material available to Microsoft Visual Studio developers and so much new technology coming out of Redmond that it's easy to fall behind the curve. Daily pressures limit the time we have to absorb it all. Fortunately, folks like Naboulsi and his colleagues can help us digest all this material so we can get condensed doses of what we most need to know and learn in the hour or two we might have to spare.
About the Author
William F. Zachmann, born before the modern digital computer was invented, has lived with them (and made his living off of them) all his life. He was director of research for The Forum Corp. in the mid-'70s and senior vice president of corporate research at International Data Corp. (IDC) in the '80s. He has a copy of Windows 1.0 that Bill Gates signed for him the night it was rolled out at Comdex Fall '85. Zachmann is now director of Canopus Research Inc. He programs in C# using Visual Studio 2005 with a focus on ASP.NET and SQL Server 2005.