Review By: Mark Cole
08/19/2011Professional Application Lifecycle Management with Visual Studio 2010 is a nuts-and-bolts instruction manual for the monstrous, all-encompassing Visual Studio 2010 Ultimate, a product that gives software teams the tools they need to architect, code, test, version control, and project manage a .NET solution.

It is pretty dry reading sequentially, but it is useful if you want to find out how to write a unit test or a script to test the user interface. It does a very good job in 655 pages of taking you through the paces of using the product, such as:

• Using top-down design to create diagrams to visually architect your application
• Using Architecture Explorer to drill down to source code using a simple sample solution
• Using the code coverage tool to see how many lines your unit tests hit
• Using the code analysis tools to see that your code uses the correct conventions for design, globalization, naming, performance, etc.
• Load testing web applications using the new Load Test Wizard.
• Setting up the build for continuous integration
• Setting up an agile team project using Visual Studio 2010, Office, and Team Foundation Server to create project portals and dashboards for the entire team

In order to get much out of the book, you need the product. Even though Visual Studio 2010 Ultimate is expensive for your company, it is free to download for thirty days (or ninety days if you register it). You will also want to download the example code, which the book uses extensively to guide you through the product. I found this quite useful, even though the examples are very simple and do not create a comprehensive whole. I would have liked to have seen an example of a single project taken from start to finish, with collaboration of all team members—architects, developers, testers—using an agile methodology to show how this tool can make a useful end product. Nevertheless, all the example code ran exactly as described and pointed me in the right direction for designing a more complex .NET product.

This book is a good reference and gives a broad view of the product. It is a "missing user's manual" for a very complicated development and software-management platform and a starting point to understanding this tool.