The target audience for this book consists of developers who work with .NET, as well as students who have already learned Visual Basic .NET (VB .NET). The book will help readers to grasp some essential concepts.
The author begins with a discussion of problems that were faced in the past and highlights the need to introduce new concepts. He includes examples taken from real-world applications. Since the book is written specifically for programmers working with .NET, common errors that programmers might make, as well as misconceptions that might arise, are highlighted at appropriate points throughout the book.
The first part contains six chapters, and presents fundamental concepts alongside new ones with great clarity. Chapter 1 is informative, and includes a discussion of the basic concepts of structure and class, and of the difference and usability of both constructs. It ends with a discussion of the object-oriented concepts that need to be understood to learn .NET. After chapter 1, the concept of inheritance is discussed. Inheritance was not truly implemented in VB. Chapter 3 covers the concept of delegate. Delegate was also not used in VB, and very few books include a detailed discussion of it. After this, the author tackles another often-neglected concept, that of reflection. Chapter 5 goes on to discuss attributes in detail. Chapter 6 presents a helpful discussion of multithreading, something that beginning and even advanced programmers are often unable to use effectively.
Part 2 focuses on good application development and deployment techniques. Chapter 7 discusses how the common object model (COM) can be used in .NET. Before .NET, many COM-based applications were developed on Microsoft platforms. This chapter shows clearly how programmers can still integrate COM into .NET code. Chapter 8 covers the interesting topic of remoting quite well. In today’s distributed processing world, this concept is important. Chapter 9 describes how to create custom Windows controls, as well as Web controls. This is a vast topic that really requires a series of chapters. However, programmers will still find valuable things in this lone chapter. Chapter 10 contains the ingredients necessary to update thin clients automatically. Chapter 11 covers ADO .NET database programming. Rather than starting with the architecture of ADO .NET, it covers objects, providing a good reference. After chapter 11, there is a chapter on advanced ADO .NET, which covers topics such as how stored procedures can be created from SQL server, and how it can be executed and debugged from the .NET environment. Both of these chapters contain good examples that programmers will find useful.
The third part, on Web programming, begins with chapter 13, which covers the demanding area of Web services. It starts with a discussion of universal description, discovery, and integration (UDDI), Web services description language (WSDL), and the simple object access protocol (SOAP), but does not cover them in detail. In addition, earlier approaches like remote procedure call (RPC) and the common object request broker architecture (CORBA) should have been included. The problems associated with these approaches could also been discussed in order to help programmers to understand the importance of more simple Web services. Chapter 14 discusses how to use ADO .NET in Web services. It also discusses how Extensible Markup Language (XML) can be used with Web services. Chapter 15 covers ASP .NET, which is again a vast subject to cover. This chapter includes some guidelines on how to create a good user interface, and how to use stylesheets to create clean Web pages. In chapter 16, there is a discussion of how to combine ADO .NET and ASP .NET. This is an informative chapter.
Finally, Part 4 covers debugging and administration. Chapter 17 gives readers some tips on removing bugs using debugging and testing techniques. Chapter 18 discusses code security, an important topic for programmers that is not often discussed in books on .NET.
The author could perhaps have improved the book by using a single application as a case study throughout, integrating all the tricks and tips included throughout the book. Since the book may be used by students who have already learned .NET, it would also have been enhanced by including questions and exercises at the end of each chapter, as well as project (application) definitions that could be developed using VB .NET.
The book covers advanced .NET topics. The author could have taken the reader more deeply into the topics presented, but instead has leaned toward simplicity, which is a positive feature. Each of the topics is presented clearly and without undue complexity that might confuse readers. At each stage of the discussion, the distinction between VB and VB .NET is made clearly, which is also helpful. All the topics are covered using appropriate examples that are easy to understand and which present the concepts nicely. The author is an experienced programmer, and he shares his experience throughout the book.
