Mastering Visual Studio 2017 – Book Review

Packt Publishing released a new title named, “Mastering Visual Studio 2017” authored by Kunal Chowdhury. I received a free copy of this book from the author and agreed to read the book and write the review.

As the title says, this book turned out to be an excellent and detailed collection of insights on various powerful capabilities of Visual Studio 2017. The approach of the book made it very easy to follow, learn as it takes you through the insides of each topic. Ranging from the installation changes to new features introduced in the Visual Studio IDE, followed by features added in it, C# 7.0 will give you the base to start with Visual Studio 2017. Then, we will move on to learning how to build apps for Windows using XAML tools, UWP tools, and .NET Core; we will learn about NuGet, more on debugging and unit testing applications, cloud development with Azure, and source controls like Git/TFS.

Book Chapters

1. What is New in Visual Studio 2017 IDE?
2. What is New in C# 7.0?
3. Building Applications for Windows Using XAML Tools
4. Building Applications for Windows 10 Using UWP Tools
5. Building Applications with .NET Core
6. Managing NuGet Packages
7. Debugging Applications with Visual Studio 2017
8. Live Unit Testing with Visual Studio 2017
9. Accelerate Cloud Development with Microsoft Azure
10. Working with Source Controls

What You Will Learn

• Learn what’s new in the Visual Studio 2017 IDE, C# 7.0, and how it will help developers to improve their productivity
• Learn the workloads and components of the new installation wizard and how to use the online and offline installer
• Build stunning Windows apps using Windows Presentation Foundation (WPF) and Universal Windows Platform (UWP) tools
• Get familiar with .NET Core and learn how to create apps targeting this new framework
• Explore everything about NuGet packages
• Debug and test your applications using Visual Studio 2017
• Accelerate cloud development with Microsoft Azure
• Integrate Visual Studio with most modern source control repositories, such as TFS and GitHub

My Thoughts

• Easy to learn and grab things
• Addressed in a straightforward language and with a lot of examples
• Covers almost every new thing released along with Visual Studio 2017
• Concepts are written clearly and explained nicely with the diagrams, screen shots, and annotation
• Each chapter is very well throughout and steps you through the details
• Accelerate Cloud Development with Microsoft Azure – is a great chapter, if you are a beginner and planning to start cloud development. Following this chapter, you can just have built a quick Azure App for yourself

Overall, if you are a beginner, want to get started with Visual Studio 2017, I would recommend this book for you. There are several concepts/topics explained in this book are not new with Visual Studio 2017. So if you are already using previous version of Visual Studio’s few information may look like repetitive ( Mostly related to Debugging features, WPF Concepts ). But to outline a book, or to consider for new Visual Studio users it is important to have those topics covered.
After reading this book, you will know most of the features related to Visual Studio, C# 7.0 and all the other development aspects related with .NET Core, Universal Windows Platforms, etc. The author, Kunal Chowdhary did a fantastic work by putting the things in a very nice way. Of course, it will be an excellent addition to your book library.

Disclosure Note: The book was provided to me free by the Author to read and review. The review is purely my personal. Neither the publisher nor the author had seen it before I published it, nor prompted me or influence me in any way.