What This Book Covers

In this book, you start by reviewing the overall architecture of .NET in the next chapter in order to give you the background you need to be able to write managed code. After that the book is divided into a number of sections that cover both the C# language and its application in a variety of areas.

Part I: The C# Language

This section gives us a good grounding in the C# language itself. This section doesn’t presume knowledge of any particular language, although it does assume you are an experienced programmer. You start by looking at C#’s basic syntax and data types, and then explore the object-oriented features of C# before moving on to look at more advanced C# programming topics.

Part II: Visual Studio

This section looks at the main IDE utilized by C# developers world-wide: Visual Studio 2005. The two chapters in this section look at the best way to use the tool to build either applications based upon the .NET Framework 2.0 or 3.0. In addition to this, this section also focuses on the deployment of your projects.

Part III: Base Class Libraries

In this section, you look at the principles of programming in the .NET environment. In particular, you look at security, threading localization, transactions, how to build Windows Services, and how to generate your own libraries as assemblies.

Part IV: Data

Here, you look at accessing databases with ADO.NET, and at interacting with directories and files. This part also extensively covers support in .NET for XML and on the Windows operating system side, and the .NET features of SQL Server 2005.

Part V: Presentation

This section focuses on building classic Windows applications, which are called Windows Forms in .NET. Windows Forms are the thick-client version of applications, and using .NET to build these types of applications is a quick and easy way of accomplishing this task. In addition to looking at Windows Forms, you will take a look at GDI+, which is the technology you will use for building applications that include advanced graphics. This section also covers writing components that will run on Web sites, serving up Web pages. This covers the tremendous number of new features that ASP.NET 2.0 provides. Finally, this section shows how to build applications based upon the Windows Presentation Foundation.

Part VI: Communication

This section is all about communication. It covers Web services for platform-independent communication, .NET Remoting for communication between .NET clients and servers, Enterprise Services for the services in the background, and DCOM communication. With Message Queuing asynchronous, disconnected communication is shown. This section also looks at utilizing the new Windows Communication Foundation and the Windows Workflow Foundation.

Part VII: Additional Information

This section includes chapters focused on how to build applications that take into account the new features and barriers found in Windows Vista. Also, this section looks at the upcoming LINQ technology and how to use this new technology in your C# applications.