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The first few chapters really spend a lot
of time digging into the framework.
Many times Grimes leads one to deep down a path (such as boxing and
unboxing) and others he refers to another chapter later (such as exception
handling etc). It's a descent
overview of .Net but requires one to read it over a few times. Many times it delves into the inner
workings of .Net that might not be easy to grasp the first time through.
The second chapter starts looking at the framework classes ,
and gives a health overview of .Net's offering. Chapter 3 gets into .Net remoting and context. Overall I think chapter 2 and 3 are
probably the best of the book.
Chapter four concerns itself with COM interop and COM+. This chapter is a good overview of what
was done before and how it works in .Net.
It is a nesecary chapter, but I for one kinda glossed over it. The price of interop tends to be fairly
high and to be avoided wherever possible.
I think this is a great chapter, though, as I am sure I will need to
do this at some point and this will be a good reference.
Chapters 5 and 6 concern themselves with Visual Studio .Net
and how to build applications. Pretty
good chapters, especially if you have not become familiar with the IDE
yet. The section on tools and external
tools are very important.
Chapter 7 is all about Visual C++.Net (managed and
unmanaged). I think this is really a
highlight as there are not many good books on Visual C++.Net. Grimes does an excellent job of describing
the enhancements to Visual C++ and some features that have been widely
ignored (ATL Server and Visual C++ unmanaged).
Chapter 8 provides an excellent overview of application
development. Unfortunately the book
does not cover ADO.Net or ASP.Net, but it makes up for it by covering many
tricky areas of development like localization, and logging mechanisms.
Chapter 9 covers debugging.
I wish this chapter was actually longer, but It does a good job of
showing debugging techniques for .Net.
This chapter is an absolute must read for any developer, as debugging
techniques can not be over stressed.
Overall I think the book is very detailed and it should be in
any serious developers library. This
is definetely not a begineer book and does not cover many aspects of .Net
development that are almost essential.
Windows Forms, Remoting are covered lightly but really almost require
a book in in-of itself to describe correctly. I recommend this book, but be careful to do a self evaluation
before you dive in. I have seen many
senior developers read this book and not understand any of it. It is very clear about it's target
audience being of a Visual C++ background, and it is not lying. I think it provides the best book for
introducing those developers into .Net.
Hope you enjoy this book too.
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