| This book is divided into five parts: Part I, "Notification Services Concepts," (Chapters 1 to 4) provides basic background information on notification applications and the Notification Services platform. It provides instructions for getting your development system set up to work with Notification Services and includes a walkthrough of a sample Notification Services application. Part II, "Notification Services Application Development," (Chapters 5 to 11) covers the specific techniques and tools used to build applications with Notification Services. It describes the development process and the parts of the application that are built at each stage, before taking you through this process with a sample application. In working through the sample application, you learn about the features of the Notification Services platform and how to use them in your own applications. Part III, "Optimization, Deployment, and Administration," (Chapters 12 to 15) covers the steps you perform after the basic development work is completed, to bring a Notification Services application online in a live production environment. It describes performance-tuning tools and techniques, deployment on various hardware configurations, and the administration and maintenance of a running application. It also includes a troubleshooting guide that provides diagnostic information and suggested solutions for the most common problems encountered in running Notification Services applications. Part IV, "Advanced Notification Services Concepts," (Chapters 16 to 18) describes some of the more advanced features of the platform, including many of the new features added in the SQL Server 2005 release. It covers the new programming APIs used to perform Notification Services management tasks programmatically and host the Notification Services engine as a component within another application. It also covers the extensions to the programming model for supporting user-defined matching logic in Notification Services applications. Part V, "Appendix," explains how to set up a development environment for building your own Notification Services applications using the tools and techniques introduced in this book's samples. By following the instructions in the appendix, you can quickly begin developing your own Notification Services applications in a familiar environment.
The first three parts of this book (Chapters 1 to 15) are ordered and organized to match the development process typically followed when creating an application using Notification Services. I expect new readers will generally work through these chapters in order, but this is not a strict requirement. Although each chapter builds on the material in previous chapters, after you have a basic understanding of Notification Services, you should be able to refer to the chapters in any order you choose. The instructions and examples in each chapter are self-contained, allowing you to use them without having to complete all the instructions in previous chapters. The chapters in the fourth part of the book present three advanced topics. These chapters can be read in any order after you become familiar with the fundamentals of Notification Services application development. These chapters shouldn't be considered required reading unless you specifically want to take advantage of the features they describe. Fully functional Notification Services applications can be built and deployed based only on the material in the first three parts of this book. Note You can refer to the book's appendix whenever you're ready to begin creating your own Notification Services applications. If you're unfamiliar with Notification Services, I recommend that you do this only after reading through Parts I and II. The material in the appendix assumes you've become familiar with the development environment used in the samples in Chapters 3 through 10.
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