Visual Studio Hacks

Last year James Avery approached me about providing some hacks for his upcoming O'Reilly hacks book, Visual Studio Hacks. I was honored to be asked, and created five such hacks on the following topics:

• Halting on exceptions
• Using the Reflector Add-In
• Setting breakpoints
• Spell checking your code/comments, and
• Generating metrics on your code (i.e., LOCs, code complexity, etc.)

These are just five of the many hacks. The majority were authored by James Avery and the other numerous contributors - see James's announcement for a full list of the contributors and additional information on this upcoming book.

So what is this book about? Who is the target audience? James describes it best:

I decided to write a book for 80% of the developers who use Visual Studio. This book is for the everyday developer who already knows how to use Visual Studio, but wants to learn about tips and tools that can help them in their everyday development tasks.

The book is available on Amazon.com for pre-order but won't ship until, likely, early March. If you use Visual Studio - and I know you do! - consider picking up a copy of this book.

This book is the first book I've contributed where I've not been a primary or sole contributor. Basically when only contributing a small percentage of a book, most publishers will just hire you on as a “work for hire,” paying a flat rate for your contribution. I have no details of the arrangements of the other contributors, but I'm wagering that James - the main editor/contributor - is the only one receiving a percentage of the gross.

These types of writing contributions - a single chapter or a small number of hacks - are a great way for prospective authors to ease into the scene, to test out if writing is of interest to them or not. As one who has written a handful of books, doing this type of job is nice every now and then as it's the only opportunity I have to just churn out a short amount of work over the course of a few days and be 100% done! No lengthy author review; no formulating the TOC; no endless nights, trying to hammer out a chapter to meet a deadline.

Even when only contributing a subset of the material of a book, serving as the editor/project manager can sometimes amount to more work than just writing the damn book yourself. I don't know what James's experiences were on this title, but I recall my first ASP.NET book, ASP.NET: Tips, Tutorials, and Code. This book had seven authors; I authored only three of the book's chapters (granted one of the chapters was approximately 100 pages), but served as the program manager. Essentially, I created the TOC and doled out the writing responsibilities, served as the first technical editor/QA guy, and was responsible for maintaining, as best I could, a consistent theme/writing style across all chapters. This book took more time, energy, and caused more stress than any other book I've worked on. I think this stemmed from the following reasons:

• There was some chaos in the list of contributing authors. Four or so of the original authors ended up dropping off due to other commitments.
• The book's code was written and fully tested on ASP.NET Beta 1 code. If you used ASP.NET in the early betas you'll remember that there were some big changes from Beta 1 to Beta 2. Meaning virtually all of the code samples had to be rewritten and retested, and the supporting prose as well.
• Editing/QAing/managing people is not my forte, nor my idea of a good time. I learned this through this project. I like to write and program. Doling out work, reminding people to meet deadlines, dealing with various people-related issues, serving as a go-between for the authors and Sams editors - I found out that these are things I'm not good at nor particularly enjoy.

It's not surprising, then, that since then I've stuck to writing my own, single-author books. This contribution for Visual Studio Hacks was a nice foray off the normal path since it did not involve any of the tasks I find most difficult/stressful. Hopefully James had a more enjoyable and less trying time in his role in writing/editing Visual Studio Hacks than I did with ASP.NET: Tips, Tutorials, and Code.