Author Deborah Kurata has spoken to .NET user groups all over America sharing her Best Kept Secrets in .NET, and she often hears experienced developers say, "I didn't know you could do that with .NET!" This book is a collection of Deborah’s insights into .NET secrets that can enhance your productivity and code quality.

For example, did you know that you could manage code snippets in Visual Studio .NET? Have you ever tried the incremental search feature? Have you discovered the ErrorProvider control? Do you know how to short-circuit operators, alias data types, build regular expressions, or improve your type casting? Have you seen all of the database tools available from Server Explorer? Did you know that you could manage your database scripts within Solution Explorer and include your stored procedures under source code control? Have you tried expanding the capabilities of a dataset using ExtendedProperties? With all of the talk about agile methodologies and extreme programming, have you tried to build a test harness with .NET? How about deprecating your methods? This book covers these secrets and much more!

Deborah also presents a collection of very valuable but lesser-known features of Visual Studio and the .NET Framework. She provides detailed information about how you can use each of these hidden treasures to improve the efficiency of your software development process and the quality of the resulting software. Whether you are an experienced developer or you're just getting started with .NET, this book will help you to be more productive, create better code, and produce superior software.

The primary goal of this book is to let you in on the secrets and hidden treasures that you can discover in Visual Studio and the .NET Framework. If, as you read through this book and say to yourself, "I didnt know I could do that with .NET!" then this book has met its objective.

Table of Contents

1. Hidden Treasures in Visual Studio
2. Doing Windows Forms
3. Code Tricks 
4. Much ADO
5. Defensive Development