Foreword

From his blog posts (in Italian and English) to his forum answers, from his online articles to his code snippets, from his technical speeches and user-groups to his books, the breadth of Alessandro’s reach has been astounding.

Now is a particularly good time for Alessandro to write this book, because the current release of Visual Basic has so many new features. I’d like to tell the story behind the most important of them, “Asynchronous Programming,” explained in Chapter 44. We introduced this feature because everyone wants their interactive applications to be fast and responsive, but the code to achieve this has traditionally been too convoluted. Now, thanks to asynchronous programming, the code has become straightforward. Although the code itself is straightforward, our small design group at Microsoft knew we were producing something unfamiliar as we sat down to design the feature in early 2010—something not taught in college courses, something whose success would depend on the ability of authors like Alessandro to explain it (which he does well).

As Language Designer of VB, I implemented the initial prototype of the feature within the VB and C# compilers. Our team first revealed it behind closed doors to MVPs (“Most Valued Professionals”) such as Alessandro at a small gathering in New Orleans, hoping that the attendees would see its worth but daunted by the challenge of explaining something so unusual. The MVPs understood the feature’s potential. They also asked us to integrate it better with other parts of Visual Studio such as debugging (Chapter 5) and unit-tests (Chapter 56), which we then did.

Indeed, there are manual useful parts to Visual Studio and .NET, and Alessandro knows them all. In this book, he makes sure that you will know all the important ones, too, and he sets them in context by explaining when and why to use them. I myself was happy to learn how to do localization (Chapter 33) and deployment (Chapters 51 and 52) from this book—both topics that I was aware of but hadn’t explored before.

Alessandro has found just the right blend of text, code, and screenshots to explain Visual Studio effectively. Beginners and experts alike will find much of value in this book.

—Lucian Wischik
Seattle, Washington
December 2012