How This Book Is Organized

The goal of Visual C# 2005: A Developer's Notebook is to equip you to create meaningful applications; not just to learn about changes to the C# language. The book is organized into five chapters. Each chapter consists of a series of labs, each of which introduces a new feature, shows how it's used, and then walks you through an example, explaining the details you need to understand along the way. Each lab includes a "What about..." section that attempts to anticipate and answer follow-up questions, as well as (perhaps most importantly) a section that tells you where you can learn more about each topic.

Chapter 1 explains what is new in the language. We start by examining one of the most anticipated features of C# 2.0, generics, and we explore them in-depth. The chapter also includes coverage of the new iterators, anonymous methods, and partial types that are part of C# 2.0, as well as static classes, nullable types, accessing objects in the Global namespace, and limiting access to fields within properties. The chapter closes with a brief discussion of delegate covariance and contravariance.

Chapter 2 explores the changes and improvements made to Visual Studio 2005. You will see how to configure the new development platform and how to put the enhanced editor to work for you. A very exciting new feature within Visual Studio 2005 is automated refactoring. The software also now offers better support for code re-use through predefined code snippets. Debugging is discussed and the new visualizers are demonstrated.

Because I assume you're learning C# 2.0 to create applications, the rest of the book focuses on just that. Chapter 3 demonstrates the new features available to you for creating Windows applications, including the new ToolStrips, masking, auto-complete text boxes, split windows, and support for adding Windows system sounds. The new data controls for Windows Forms are demonstrated, as is ClickOnce deployment, a new feature that greatly improves the feasibility of using rich clients or so-called Smart Clients, for certain kinds of networked applications.

Chapter 4 is all about new features for building web applications, some of which are found in the ASP.NET 2.0 Framework libraries and others in the Visual Studio 2005 IDE. The goal of the ASP.NET 2.0 development team was to make it possible to build web applications with 75% less code than was required for ASP.NET 1.x applications. Their success is remarkable. Chapter 4 covers the new controls that facilitate security, authentication, and personalization, as well as new support for creating uniform and coherent sites with themes and master pages.

Finally, Chapter 5 focuses on the new .NET 2.0 controls for data access along with revisions to the ADO.NET classes. Topics include creating master/detail records with no code and integrating XML data sources into your application.