Delightful!

I ordered this book a few weeks after ordering my tech preview copy of Visual Studio.NET "Whidbey" and got them both in the mail on the same day. I've read the book and am just starting to work with the amazing new tools, technologies and techniques it describes, and I can't remember the last time I was this excited about an upcoming developer tools release. ASP.NET 2.0 resolves 99% of the issues I have with ASP.NET 1.x and introduces lots of new mind-boggling features that I never knew I needed, but now I wonder how I ever lived without.

If you're an ASP.NET developer and are planning to upgrade your skills to the new platform, you owe it to yourself to get a copy of this book. I read it in about two weeks of bedtime reading and could have finished it in a few days if I'd invested any real time, so it's not a big investment of effort to get through. The authors do a great job of sticking to just the new features and assuming that their readers all know ASP.NET 1.x pretty thoroughly, so there was little wasted space. All code samples were in VB.NET, which was a little weird, but it was very refreshing not to see the same code repeated in VB anc C#, which so many books do to pad their page count.

If I have one complaint about the book, it's that there is no reference in it to the sample code and applications available online. The authors have a web site with working versions of all of the example applications used in the book, along with downloadable code so those of us with the tech preview of Whidbey can have a good starting point. Here's the URL:

http://www.ipona.com/samples/

Other Reviews

• Dated...already?
• Great into to ASP.NET
• With specific troubleshooting problems to watch out for
• Delightful!
• Time to get excited about Whidbey