As I announced yesterday I will be speaking at the Philly Code Camp 2009.1 on Visual Studio 2008 for beginners.  As part of this presentation I want to be able to provide the 10 most valuable tips for beginners using Visual Studio.

I did a quick search of the internet last night, on this subject, and everything seemed to point to Sara Ford as the defacto standard on Visual Studio tips.  She even has a best selling book on the subject, appropriately called Microsoft Visual Studio Tips.

And because she is such an awesome person all the royalties from the book are going to a scholarship fund to help pay for the the costs of sending Hurricane Katrina survivors to college. So if you are interested go pick up a copy.

The problem is that she has 251 tips in the book, and 382 tips on her website and I need to widdle this down to the top 10.

Here are my top 3, so far:

1. Did you know… You can create toolbar buttons to quickly toggle your favorite VS Settings? – #372
2. Did you know… how not to accidentally copy a blank line? – #050
3. Did you know… How to optimize Visual Studio for multi-monitors? – #381

What are yours? If you have a favorite please include it in the comments below with a link (if possible).

I will be doing a presentation on Programming in Visual Studio in the Beginners track, which will start at 10:00 AM.  I expect to see you all there.  Also if you have any tips on what you find to be a useful feature in Visual Studio for new developers please leave it in the comments below.

I have included the announcement below in case anybody is going to be in the Philly area on April 18th and want to hang out with a bunch of .NET developers.

Code Camp 2009.1 Anouncement

Our first installment of the 2009 Code Camp series will be held at the DeVry University campus in Fort Washington, PA on Saturday, April 18 from 8:30-5:00. Please register on our web site. Detailed directions are on the DeVry web site or Get Directions from Microsoft Live.

• Lots of code, just say no to slides!
• 8 hours
• 60 sessions (8:30, 10:00, 12:30, 2:00, 3:30)
• 12 tracks including new hands-on Beginner series and the Bonus Track
• 500 seats with tables (laptops welcome)
• Free breakfast, lunch, and afternoon snack (expanded menu!)
• Raffles and prizes at 5:00
• Easy parking

All of this is made possible by our Gold partners (HostMySite, Software Logic, RTTS), Silver partners (RedGate, Quest, RTTS, Oxford Computer Group) and our Platinum site sponsors (DeVry University, Microsoft).

Here is the tentative agenda, room assignments and times are subject to change. Check here and here for the latest printable agenda.

Update: My name hasn’t been updated on the speakers list.  But you are definitly going to see me their teaching beginners how to master the basics of Visual Studio.

It was just announced at MIX09 that ASP.NET MVC 1.0 has been released for general use and is out of the Release Candidate phase.  There has been no word on the changes form RC 2 to this release version.  But I will keep this post updated as I learn more.  Also as of writing this the download hasn’t been posted to CodePlex either, but I am sure that it will be posted pretty soon.

I am assured by Wrox that the cover of the book will be updated to look like what is on the right of your screen.  So it should be any day now, so go pre-order a copy today by clicking on the cover image to your right and it will take you to the Amazon page where you can place your pre-order.  That way as soon as the book ships you will have a copy waiting on your front porch.

Update: It is available from Microsoft Download.  Probably on CodePlex by the end of the day.  Here is the final description of the download for your reading pleasure.

ASP.NET MVC 1.0 provides a new Model-View-Controller (MVC) framework on top of the existing ASP.NET 3.5 runtime. This means that developers can take advantage of the MVC design patterns to create their Web Applications which includes the ability to achieve and maintain a clear separation of concerns (the UI or view from the business and application logic and backend data), as well as facilitate test driven development (TDD). The ASP.NET MVC framework defines a specific pattern to the Web Application folder structure and provides a controller base-class to handle and process requests for “actions”. Developers can take advantage of the specific Visual Studio 2008 MVC templates within this release to create their Web applications, which includes the ability to select a specific Unit Test structure to accompany their Web Application development.

The MVC framework is fully extensible at all points, allowing developers to create sophisticated structures that meet their needs, including for example Dependency Injection (DI) techniques, new view rendering engines or specialized controllers.

As the ASP.NET MVC framework is built on ASP.NET 3.5, developers can take advantage of many existing ASP.NET 3.5 features, such as localization, authorization, Profile etc.

Update: Phil Haack just posted his MVC 1.0 Release Anouncement.