Preface


On January 14, 2002, I was a Java developer. I didn't like Windows much at that point, mainly because I had been burned one too many times by COM and Win32 in the years prior. I was loving life without HANDLEs, WinDbg, and free and delete. I'd spent years developing using Microsoft tools and technologies in the mid-to-late 1990s, but had become turned off by the massively complex ecosystem that had developed. Java was no walk in the park either, but it offered things like a sandboxed execution environment, simple (pointer free!) language syntax, and garbage collection. The libraries were nicely designed so that an OO purist could feel right at home (not that I was one).

But seemingly overnight, I became a Windows developer once again. I learned to love the platform again. This date reflected an industry-wide inflection point—in addition to a large personal one—which, in retrospect years later, clearly catapulted programming models on the Windows platform back into the forefront of mainstream software development. What factors contributed to this revolutionary shift in direction? It's simple: the .NET Framework, the C# language, and the foundation for both, the Common Language Runtime (CLR), were all released for download on MSDN on January 15.

And now we're on the third major iteration of the platform, with releases 1.0, 1.1, and now 2.0 on the market. The technologies continue to mature, get more robust and reliable, and leapfrog the competition with innovative (and risky) new technologies. Yep, I must confess: I love the CLR.

Goals of This Book

The goal of this book is first and foremost to get you excited about the .NET Framework and CLR 2.0 technologies, and to inspire you to write great code on the platform. Great applications and libraries written by users are equally important—if not more—than the platform itself. If anything that I've written in this book inspires you to go out and write the next google.com on the CLR, and you subsequently get rich doing so, I've done my job.

Of course, most people want a book for practical purposes too (like doing their jobs). So that's a goal of this book as well. This book should serve as an excellent sit-down read to get you up to speed on what 2.0 has to offer, a quick ramp up to the platform from 0 to 60 in no time, and/or a reference book for times of desperation. I also believe it will act as a great launching pad from which to drill deeper into particular areas of this technology that excite you.

Lots of the topics in this book are much deeper than what is presented. This is out of necessity. I've covered many of the most important facets of the runtime and libraries—and omitted at least one, I'm sure—but to do it all would require about 10,000 more pages of text. To save you time and the hassle of reading so many words, I've prioritized and focused on what topics I believe to be most important for (1) immediately increased productivity on the platform, (2) a long-term fundamental understanding of the architecture, and (3) practical advice for avoiding common pitfalls and writing great code in your applications today.




Professional. NET Framework 2.0
Professional .NET Framework 2.0 (Programmer to Programmer)
ISBN: 0764571354
EAN: 2147483647
Year: N/A
Pages: 116
Authors: Joe Duffy

flylib.com © 2008-2017.
If you may any questions please contact us: flylib@qtcs.net