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Moving to VB.NET: Strategies, Concepts and Code - Dan Appleman Reviewer: Michael Steinberg - michael.steinberg@hdnug.org

Dan Appleman is one of the elders of Visual Basic. He has been using it since the VB 1.0 beta. Dan has written many important books. He has also been a speaker at numerous conferences. He is also the founder and president of Desaware, a third party developer that has created many products to enable VB programmers to do things that VB alone cannot. His first book (I am sure others will follow) about VB.NET is divided into sections that parallel the title. Strategies is the smallest section but it sets the stage for what is to follow. First he states the scary premise that "Everything you know is Obsolete", then he explains why VB programers should both welcome and be excited about VB.NET. The book here goes into deployment considerations.Unlike Microsoft (which says that the transition will be fairly painless) he feels that VB.NET will require a substantial learning curve. He then explains why it is a worthwhile effort. Also addressed here is the question of porting existing applications. The section on Concepts is broken up into 4 sections. The first basically goes over background information on what was wrong with COM and how .NET fixes these problems. Then he gets into the meat with the next three chapters entitled Inheritance, Memory Management in VB.NET and VB.NET Multithreading. These are what Appleman calls the three major conceptual challenges in moving to VB.NET. These three chapters are very important since these concepts are central to all .NET languages.Here again his insight is different from Microsoft's and somewhat irreverent. His final verdict on Inheritance is, "Inheritance is probably the most overhyped feature in VB.NET, one that you should almost never use even while you are always using it." In memory management we learn about objects, garbage collection and dead objects being brought back to life. Multithreading has been something I have wished for VB to have for a long time. The book does a good job of going over the benefits and risks that this entails. He goes on to dig into the nuts and bolts of how the data types and syntax has changed from VB6 on the section on Code. These are chapters you will probably find useful for a long while and will want to re-read at least once, I know I have. Dan also goes deeply into objects and reflection in this section. The final four chapters deal with the wonderful world of .NET. These chapters deal with miscellaneous topics like namespace, com interop and accessing the Win32 api. The book while not a comprehensive guide to VB.NET nor a "How-To", is a very close peek into VB.NET and the underlying infrastructure as well as issues that anyone must address to program in VB.NET. It is well written, understandable and introduces the reader to VB.NET in a way that allows them to build a foundation for future knowledge about .NET which will be with us for some time. I liked this book and found it very useful. I recommend it to anyone who has programmed in VB and is wondering what the future with VB.NET is all about Top

.NET Enterprise Development in C#: From Design to Deployment - Matthew Reynolds and Karli Watson Reviewer: David C. Broussard - david.broussard@insoure.com

I have been looking for a great .NET book ever since I first started learning about it last year. In .NET Enterprise Development in C# I have found it (there is also a VB.NET version of the same book). This book is a medium level discussion of total application development from design to deployment in the .NET world. It pulls no punches on the technical front using some advanced coding techniques to accomplish its goal of delivering a well-designed .NET application, taking advantage of many of the advances that the .NET framework has to offer. One of the features of this book is that it comes with a free download from the Wrox website of their Wrox Enterprise Objects (WEO), complete with a code builder that will analyze a SQL server database and automatically build a complete object model and data access layer. The techniques used in the creation of this object model could be the subject of an entire other book, and the reader can learn a great deal about how to use some fairly advanced techniques such as reflection, interfaces, and inheritance. The book only scratches the surface of the WEO, spending a dozen pages or so discussing how it all interrelates while staying on the primary topic of Application Design and Deployment (there is a longer discussion on the WEO in an appendix). One interesting theory that the authors put forth is that with the advent of .NET we will see a return to the Windows application and somewhat of a departure from the Weblication that ASP promulgated. Their reasoning is that with the fuller features of the Windows user interface, and the ease of deployment of .NET assemblies (to include the ability to automatically load needed assemblies from the Internet), developers can take advantage of WinForms and still develop thin clients. To accomplish this task, Reynolds and Watson develop an “Application Browser” that dynamically loads assemblies of functionality on an as needed basis. These assemblies are made available to the user from an IIS server. Perhaps the best aspect of this book is its integration of all the aspects of application development. They discuss authentication using a Web Service and show how the Web Service can be used to identify a user via tokens to the rest of the business objects. They also separate the business representation of the data from the actual database access and later in the book show how to host those objects on a remote server using .NET remoting. The authors conclude the book with a discussion of deployment, administration, and management of the application. Reynolds and Watson have managed to put into just over 400 pages an entire discussion of best practices for .NET development in the enterprise. This book is one of the first of the second generation of .NET books that will leave the discussion of the framework and language aside and discuss instead the techniques for developing robust applications in the real world. If nothing else it shows you the application of some of the features of .NET so that you can apply them to your applications. It’s the best $50 I have spent on a computer book in some time. Top

Teach Yourself ASP.NET in 21 Days - Chris Payne Reviewer: David C. Broussard - david.broussard@insoure.com

People either love or hate the Teach Yourself in X days/hours series of books. Personally I have never had much use for them. Usually they go from the too simple to the too complex while using examples that do not apply to the work that I do every day. This particular book however was a departure from that trend, and one that was very welcome to experience. For those that are not familiar with the format of the Teach Yourself in 21 Days books, they are divided up into three weeks: the first week being an introduction to the topic; the second week being some useful examples; and the third week going into topics that are often esoteric. In this particular book, Mr. Payne uses the first week to introduce the reader to the basic concepts of ASP.NET covering the creation of pages, and some introduction to the VB.NET language (with a brief mention of C# as well). He concludes the first week with a discussion of web forms and the concept of validation. The second week jumps right into using databases with a chapter on database design, and then a discussion of ADO.NET and how to use it in your ASP.NET pages. He also demonstrates how easy it is to use XML in ASP.NET, and looks at server file access and caching. The final week is a discussion of topics that will take the ASP.NET pages from the simple to the usable. How to integrate business objects, Web Services, security, code behind pages, debugging and deployment are all addressed in a fair amount of detail by the author. So why should you consider this book? First off, it is geared towards the ASP developer with a section in each Chapter subtitled “That’s Not ASP” in which Mr. Payne compares and contrasts techniques in ASP.NET with old style ASP. Another great reason to purchase this book is that the examples that are used are real world enough to allow the reader to apply the code in the book directly in their projects. With sections on building your own user controls, reading XML directly into a DataSet and appendices on application integration and mobile web forms, the reader completes the 21 lessons with the ability to jump into a project and be productive almost immediately. The book has a few things that either limit its usefulness or enhance it depending upon your point of view. It is written for the Beta 2, though on August 13th Sams will release the new edition written for the production release of .NET (available at www.samspublishing.com). The book does not make use of VS.NET allowing the reader to use Notepad to create all the examples. This is a benefit to those who want to learn .Net but do not have access to Visual Studio. WebMatrix would be a perfect tool for working through this book. All in all, Teach Yourself ASP.NET in 21 Days is a very good introduction to the .NET framework in general and ASP.NET in particular. It is geared towards the ASP programmer and will show them the differences between ASP.NET and old style ASP programming. Speaking from the experience of this reviewer, it is an excellent resource for a corporate training program to upgrade your employees to .NET Top

C# Developer's Guide to ASP.NET, XML, and ADO.NET - Jeffrey P. McManus and Chris Kinsman Reviewer: Kirk Mahoney, Ph.D. - kirkmahoneyphd@hotmail.com

If you are preparing for the MCP 70-315 exam, I recommend this book as a companion to Microsoft's "Self-Paced Training Kit" book about that exam. We in the HDNUG C# study group went through the latter book last year, and McManus and Kinsman opened my eyes to several topics that Microsoft's "big orange" book only lightly touched. Much of the thickness of the book is due to the included source code and tables of properties and methods for many .NET Framework classes. However, this content helped me understand what the authors were discussing, and there were some good jewels in the source code. The formatting of the book is quite linear and minimally uses white space between sections, which makes it difficult to use a chapter's "IN THIS CHAPTER" call-out to find what you want. But, if you're willing to dig, you'll find some valuable nuggets. I particularly liked: Figure 7.1, which presents a process flow for the forms authentication process; Table 9.1, which describes in order the events raised by System.Web.UI.Control in custom server controls; Table 11.1, which gives steps to perform for common database-access scenarios with ADO.NET; and, the list on page 338 of the 15 events that ASP.NET raises when processing a request received from IIS. Top

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