This book starts by reviewing the overall architecture of .NET in order to give you the background you need to be able to write managed code. After that, the book is divided into a number of sections that cover both the C# language and its application in a variety of areas.
Part I: The C# Language: This section gives a good grounding in the C# language itself. This section doesn’t presume knowledge of any particular language, although it does assume you are an experienced programmer. You start by looking at C's basic syntax and data types, and then explore the object-oriented features of C# before moving on to look at more advanced C# programming topics. Objects, types, inheritance, generics, arrays, tuples, operators, casts, delegates, lambdas, events, strings, regular expressions, collections, Language Integrated, Query (LINQ), Dynamic Language Extensions, memory management, pointers, reflection, errors, and exception are all covered in part 1.
Part II: Visual Studio: This section looks at the main IDE utilized by C# developers worldwide: Visual Studio 2010. The two chapters in this section look at the best way to use the tool to build applications based on the .NET Framework 4. In addition, this section also focuses on the deployment of your projects.
Part III: Foundation: In this section, you look at the principles of programming in the .NET environment. In particular, you look at assemblies, instrumentation, security, threading, tasks, synchronization, localization, System.Transactions, networking, interop, XAML, Managed Extensibility Framework, Manipulating Files and the Registry, transactions, how to build Windows services, and how to generate your own libraries as assemblies, among other topics.
Part IV: Data: Here, you look at accessing databases with ADO.NET, ADO.NET Entity Framework, data services. This part also extensively covers support in .NET for XML and on the Windows operating system side, and the .NET features of SQL Server 2008.
Part V: Presentation: This section shows how to build applications based upon the Windows Presentation Foundation and Silverlight, and covers writing components that will run on web sites, serving up web pages. It also has coverage on building classic Windows applications, which are called
Windows Forms in .NET. Windows Forms are the thick-client version of applications, and using .NET to build these types of applications is a quick and easy way of accomplishing this task. Finally, it includes coverage of the tremendous number of features that ASP.NET, ASP.NET MVC, and ASP.Net Dynamic Data provide.
Part VI: Communication: This section is all about communication. It covers services for platform-independent communication using the Windows Communication Foundation (WCF). With Message Queuing, asynchronous disconnected communication is shown. This section looks at utilizing the Windows Workflow Foundation 4, as well as peer to peer networking, and creating syndication feeds.
The book closes with an appendix covering Windows 7 and Windows Server 2008 R2 development.
Online Chapters: Even with such a large book, we can't fit in everything we'd like to tell you about C# and using this language with other .NET technologies, so we've made ten additional chapters available online at wrox.com. These chapters include information on a variety of topics: GDI+, which is a technology that is used for building applications that include advanced graphics; .Visual Studio Tools for Office (VSTO); NET Remoting for communication between .NET clients and servers; Enterprise Services for the services in the background; web services with ASP.NET, LINQ to SQL, Windows Workflow Foundation 3.0, and the Managed Add-In Framework (MAF). It also includes examples showing .NET 4 in others supported languages including Visual Basic, C++/CLI, and F#.
Note: CD-ROM/DVD and other supplementary materials are not included as part of eBook file.
Customer Reviews & Comments
C# and .NET are reintroduced in this one book for the 2010 audience of programmers. The two subjects are wedded in the text to form one complete reference. I have just finished reading this book and I can tell you that it will take another two readings to fully absorb the contents because of the numerous details. At just over 1400 pages, this is a compendium of the two programming areas that has enormous scope. I am impressed that the authors and the publisher were able to complete this project before the release of the two in April. Operations specific to the .NET v4 release are noted in the text.
I found the information in this book to be comprehensive and detailed in many ways. With 47 chapters and an appendix this book is going to be the cornerstone of my .NET computing from this time on. My previous references are getting dated and don't give me enough information to pass the employment interviews. This book and one other are going to be my entire reference library for C# programming in general.
I found the information to be very well written to the point that even after six years of using C# it increased my knowledge and understanding of this wonderful new computer language. I have over a dozen books on .NET and C# in my library and this is the best written of them all. For this reason I am giving it 5 stars. I believe that this is the best introduction to these two subject areas
Of course, if you want to work in depth on one of the chapters covered in this book, another reference that expands on the material will be required.
