What This Book Covers

In this book, we start by reviewing the overall architecture of .NET in the next chapter in order to give us the background we need to be able to write managed code. After that the book is divided into a number of sections that cover both the C# language and its application in a variety of areas.

Part I: The C# Language

This section gives us a good grounding in the C# language itself. This section doesn't presume knowledge of any particular language, although it does assume you are an experienced programmer. We start by looking at C#'s basic syntax and data types, and then discuss the object-oriented features of C# before moving on to look at more advanced C# programming topics.

Part II: The .NET Environment

In this section, we look at the principles of programming in the .NET environment. In particular, we look at Visual Studio .NET, security, threading deployment of .NET applications, and how to generate your own libraries as assemblies.

Part III: Data

Here we look at accessing databases with ADO.NET, and at interacting with directories and Active Directory. We also extensively cover support in .NET for XML and on the Windows operating system side, and the .NET features of SQL Server 2005.

Part IV: Windows Applications

This section focuses on building classic Windows applications, which are called Windows Forms in.NET. Windows Forms are the thick-client version of applications, and using .NET to build these types of applications is a quick and easy way of accomplishing this task. In addition to looking at Windows Forms, we will take a look at GDI+, which is the technology we will use for building applications that include advanced graphics.

Part V: Web Applications

In this section, we cover writing components that will run on Web sites, serving up Web pages. This covers the tremendous amount of new features that ASP.NET 2.0 provides.

Part VI: Communication

This section is all about communication. Here we cover Web services for platform-independent communication, .NET Remoting for communication between .NET clients and servers, Enterprise Services for the services in the background and DCOM communication. With message queuing asynchronous, disconnected communication is shown. The chapter "Future of Distributed Programming" prepares you for the future so you can make the correct communication choices for your current solutions.

Part VII: Interop

Backward compatibility with COM is an important part of .NET. Too many COM components and applications have been developed. This section shows how to use existing COM components with .NET applications, and the other way around, how to use .NET components within COM applications.

Part VIII: Windows Base Services

This section, the concluding part of the main body of the book, covers accessing the file and registry, accessing the Internet through your applications, and working with Windows Services.

Part IX: Appendices (Web Site Only)

This section includes several appendices detailing the principles of object-oriented programming as well as programming language-specific information about C#. These appendices are available as PDFs on the Web site accompanying this book (http://www.wrox.com).