Professional Visual Studio 2008 is for all developers new to Visual Studio as well as those programmers
who have some experience but want to learn about features they may have previously overlooked.
If you are familiar with the way previous versions of Visual Studio worked, you may want to skip Part I,
which deals with the basic constructs that make up the user interface, and move on to the remainder of
the book where the new features found in Visual Studio 2008 are discussed in detail.
If you ’ re just starting out, you ’ ll greatly benefit from the first part, where basic concepts are explained
and you ’ re introduced to the user interface and how to customize it to suit your own style.
This book does assume that you are familiar with the traditional programming model, and it uses both
the C# and Visual Basic languages to illustrate features within Visual Studio 2008. In addition, it is
assumed that you can understand the code listings without an explanation of basic programming
concepts in either language. If you ’ re new to programming and want to learn Visual Basic, please take a
look at Beginning Visual Basic 2008 by Thearon Willis and Bryan Newsome. Similarly, if you are after a
great book on C#, track down Beginning Visual C# 2008, written collaboratively by a host of authors.