Conventions

We have used a number of different styles of text and layout in the book to help differentiate between the different kinds of information. Here are examples of the styles we use and an explanation of what they mean:

Bullets appear indented, with each new bullet marked as follows:

• Important Words are in a bold type font.

• Keys that you press on the keyboard, like Ctrl and Enter, are in italics.

Code appears in a number of different ways. If it's a word that we're talking about in the text — for example, when discussing the if...else loop — it's in this font. If it's a block of code that you can type in as a program and run, then it's also in a gray box:

 public static void Main() { AFunc(1,2,"abc"); } 

Sometimes you'll see code in a mixture of styles, like this:

// If we haven't reached  // set the position to invalid, and return false. pos++; if (pos < 4)    return true; else {    pos = -1;    return false; }

The code with a white background is code we've already looked at and that we don't wish to examine further.

Note

Advice, hints, and background information come in an italicized, indented font like this.

Important

Important pieces of information come in boxes like this.

We demonstrate the syntactical usage of methods, properties (and so on) using the following format:

Regsvcs BookDistributor.dll [COM+AppName] [TypeLibrary.tbl]

Here, italicized parts indicate object references, variables, or parameter values to be inserted; the square braces indicate optional parameters.