About This Book

Until I wrote Understanding COM+, all of my books had been low-level how- to manuals and tutorials, with the samples written in C++. This worked beautifully for hard-core programmers who write in C++, but unfortunately this is a small percentage of the people who buy computer books, which made my creditors very unhappy. I wanted to make this book accessible to developers who didn’t know or didn’t like C++. Furthermore, I found that managers got essentially nothing out of my C++-based approach because they never worked with the sample programs (with only one exception I know of, and I’m sending him a free copy of this book for working so hard to understand my last one). I really wanted to reach that audience, even more than programmers. An ignorant (or worse, half-educated) manager is an extremely dangerous beast. Eliminating that species would be my grand contribution to civilization.

This book uses the basic style I experimented with in my last book, in which I adapted the format that David Chappell used so successfully in his book Understanding ActiveX and OLE (Microsoft Press, 1996): lots of explanations, lots of diagrams, and very little code in the text descriptions. As much as I liked David Chappell’s book, I still felt hungry for code (as I often need a piece of chocolate cake to top off a meal of delicate sushi). I found myself writing code to help me understand his ideas, much as I wrote equations to understand the textual descriptions in Stephen Hawking’s A Brief History of Time. (OK, I’m a geek.) So my book comes with sample programs for all the chapters, some of which I wrote myself and some of which I adapted from Microsoft’s samples. These sample programs are available on this book’s Web site, which is http://www.introducingmicrosoft.net, naturally. Managers and architects will be able to read the book without drowning in code, while code-hungry programmers will still be able to slake their appetites. Most of the sample code I present in the text of this book is written in Visual Basic .NET because that’s the language that most of my readers are familiar with. However, I got so many requests for C# code after the first edition of this book that I’ve also provided C# versions of all the samples on the book’s Web site. If you want to run the sample programs, you’ll need a computer running the Microsoft .NET Framework SDK and Visual Studio. Detailed system and installation requirements for the sample programs are available on the book’s Web site.

Sample programs and installation instructions are available on this book’s Web site.

Each chapter presents a single topic from the top down. I start by describing the architectural problem that needs to be solved. I then explain the high-level architecture of the infrastructure that .NET provides to help you solve that problem with a minimum amount of code. I next walk you through the simplest example I can imagine that employs the solution. Managers may want to stop reading after this section. I then continue with a discussion of finer points—other possibilities, boundary cases, and the like. Throughout, I’ve tried to follow Pournelle’s Law, coined by Jerry Pournelle in his “Chaos Manor” computing column in the original Byte magazine, which states simply, “You can never have too many examples.”

Each chapter of this book presents a single topic from the top down.