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The Book of Visual Studio .NET Review by David Gurgel
Badly Named, But Very Serious and Very Useful
The title, "The Book of Visual Studio .NET," is misleading. The book is not an in-depth guide to using Visual Studio and barely touches on extending and customizing Visual Studio. A better title would have been "A Developer's Accelerated Introduction To .NET." It assumes the reader is a working developer, new to .NET, and moves at a brisk pace. Only one of twelve chapters focuses on the Visual Studio tools although Visual Studio is used throughout to design, code, compile, run, and trouble-shoot examples for nearly every topic. After brief disappointment (I wanted a Visual Studio handbook), I read the book cover to cover and learned something in each chapter after more than two years of heavy reading and significant development effort with .NET. If I taught a course on .NET, this would be my text!
Most of the .NET landscape is explored in the 369 pages - including: Visual Studio, the .NET framework and CLR, VB.NET, Windows forms, web forms, web services, ASP.NET, ADO.NET, XML, and COM interoperability. But C# and C++ are given almost no space.
Design and code samples are numerous and are no longer than needed to demonstrate the essential concepts. You will want to be sitting at your computer with a full deck of .NET available - Visual Studio, IIS, and SQL Server. The code can be downloaded.
This is probably an ideal book for someone crossing over from the Java world or moving on from older Micsrosoft technologies. If you are quite expert in other OOP technologies but new to .NET, two days with this book will get you started on your first .NET project or prepare you for a .NET job interview.
This is the author's first book; he is an experienced system architect working in .NET and COM. The publisher, No Starch Press, is small and new but headed by one of the Apress (serious books for serious people) founders. Their site suggests a bunch of San Francisco guys willing to put away their Linux and Java for a grudging review of the enemy's (Microsoft's) armored division. But I could still hear one of them say, "Microsoft .NET is not even in use within one hundred miles."
Nothing was too hard and nothing was too easy. Definitely no starch!