Organization of This Book

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This book is loosely organized into three sections that cover, respectively, core technologies, advanced technologies, and performance and debugging. Part I, "Moving to Enterprise Development with Visual Basic .NET," covers fundamental concepts that are critical to enterprise development: an overview of enterprise development, core language features, threading, and interoperability.

Part II, "Building an Enterprise Infrastructure," covers various forms of network communications, Windows services, COM+, Windows Messaging, and security. The purpose of this section is to provide an introduction to many of the application infrastructure technologies, building off of the topics introduced in Part I.

Part III, "Performance and Debugging," covers the remaining major topics for this book: debugging techniques, top Visual Basic .NET performance issues, and performance tuning concepts.

The four appendices contain a wealth of information that serves as either supporting or additional reference material for the preceding chapters. This includes information on leveraging Visual Studio .NET Enterprise for team development, an introduction to Application Center Test (ACT) for performance testing, information on .NET performance counters, and a common performance counter reference for performance analysis.

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