Who Should Read This Book

I l @ ve RuBoard

Who Should Read This Book

There are two core audiences for this book: the novice Visual Basic .NET programmer and the classically trained Visual Basic developer who, already familiar with the Visual Basic .NET language, wants to see how new platform features can be and should be integrated into applications. Most of the material in this book is intended to be an extension of existing technical resources. If you're expecting a ground-up introduction to Visual Basic .NET, you'll be disappointed. I have an expectation that you have a basic familiarity with the language and platform. If you do not, there are plenty of excellent books from Microsoft Press on the subject of Visual Basic .NET and I'd recommend starting there.

The majority of the material in this book is written from the perspective of a Visual Studio .NET developer, and I'll often reference how the Visual Studio IDE can help you develop your applications. This is not to say that I've made the material dependent upon a single release version of Visual Studio or even the .NET Framework. Although it is admittedly impossible to anticipate all future changes to the platform, I believe that much of the subject matter contained in this book will last for quite a while. Even though the topics are more advanced than you might find in your average book about Visual Basic, they are mostly about fundamental concepts and techniques that should not change drastically as time goes on. Fingers crossed.

Note

All the samples and technologies included in this book apply equally well to the original Visual Studio .NET release as well as the Visual Studio .NET 2003 product. What I have attempted to convey are more fundamental concepts that should have longevity, even as future versions of the .NET Framework and Visual Basic .NET are released.

I l @ ve RuBoard

Organization of This Book

This book is loosely organized into three sections that cover, respectively, core technologies, advanced technologies, and performance and debugging. Part I, "Moving to Enterprise Development with Visual Basic .NET," covers fundamental concepts that are critical to enterprise development: an overview of enterprise development, core language features, threading, and interoperability.

Part II, "Building an Enterprise Infrastructure," covers various forms of network communications, Windows services, COM+, Windows Messaging, and security. The purpose of this section is to provide an introduction to many of the application infrastructure technologies, building off of the topics introduced in Part I.

Part III, "Performance and Debugging," covers the remaining major topics for this book: debugging techniques, top Visual Basic .NET performance issues, and performance tuning concepts.

The four appendices contain a wealth of information that serves as either supporting or additional reference material for the preceding chapters. This includes information on leveraging Visual Studio .NET Enterprise for team development, an introduction to Application Center Test (ACT) for performance testing, information on .NET performance counters, and a common performance counter reference for performance analysis.

I l @ ve RuBoard

Updates and Other Information

The topic of enterprise application development is as broad and diverse as the applications that exist in the real world. This book cannot serve as a one-stop reference to enterprise application development ”no single book can ”but we'll cover the advanced features of Visual Basic .NET that are critical to enterprise applications and we'll explain how you can use these features effectively.

Also, aside from some syntactic issues, the material in this book applies equally well to developers who use any language on the common language runtime. Remember that Microsoft is evangelizing the various .NET languages as a "lifestyle" choice: program in the language that you're most comfortable with. This is why we're seeing languages such as COBOL, Perl, and FORTRAN coming to the .NET platform. As long as these languages are CLR-compliant, they have an equal footing and thus can take advantage of most, if not all, of the same platform features.

I l @ ve RuBoard

Flylib.com

Category list

Similar pages

Who Should Read This Book