Hi
I guess this is quite a self-explanatory title. I need some tutorials showing the cool things of VS, but almost everything I find looks like being "How to conect a Web-app to a DB" kind of video-tutorial or a list of features and advertisement text. I am going to use it for C++ game programming. I'm new to this IDE but I heard it has some interesting features and I was wondering what good online resources, walkthroughs or tutorials are there. Anything worthwhile?
Take a look at Building High Performance Games using Visual C++ 2005 .
If it's about IDE features in general rather than coding, you might like the Visual Studio Tip Of The Day series over at Sara Ford's WebLog. Some of the tips are for the modern SKUs (i.e., VB.NET and C#), but many are for Visual Studio in general. There are tips for both 2005 and 2008, search for the appropriate tags.
Apart from that, not only the IDE in general, but also the C++ compiler got an overhaul in the 2008 release, so you may want to try Visual C++ 2008 Express for free.
For me, when taking on something completely new, I need to actually do something in addition to reading about it or watching some type of video. While these are all great ways to get up and going, nothing takes the place of actually doing.
It always amazes me how much attention Microsoft places on the developers. They offer numerous resources, much of which I think are unknown to the general community. My favorite and often untapped resource from them is their Webcasts and Virtual Labs.
I usually watch a webcast or two and then follow it up with doing a Virtual Lab. These Virtual Labs are amazing as one can establish a session with one of their virtual machines that are completley dedicated to the learning of something specific. I mean, you get an entire development environment at your finger tips along with a step by step instruction guide on how to do whatever it is the lab is teaching. It's always been super helpful when I'm learning something new.
If you are not that bound to C++, you can use the XNA Framework for .NET. Its a Game Programming framework for C#, where you're games can run on both the PC and the XBOX360. Take a look at it, at http://creators.xna.com - there is alot of tutorials and stuff there for learning how to program games, from beginner to advanced.
And yes, XNA can make cool looking games, look at: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TgChURF5fQE for a game that is made in XNA, and there is also games from XNA common in XBOX live arcade soon. One is already there: http://creators.xna.com/en-us/community_main_feature4
There's a book called Visual Studio Hacks and there is also a website with the same name. These may have some of the kind of things you are looking for.