Updates and Other Information

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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