Developing Applications with Visual Studio.NET (DevelopMentor) [Paperback]

The book really comes from the perspective of a Win32/C++ developer. I would not recommend this book, unless you have come from this background, or really want to understand some of the internals of .Net (and are really willing to spend some time in it). It also only really covers Visual C# and Visual C++.Net (managed and unmanaged).
Overall it is a quality book that offers a lot of insight into the world of .Net. It requires one to read it a few times through to really get the details as Grimes has a tendency to dig deep into details that may not make sense at the time.
The organization is fair but could use a lot of work as the chapter layout seems a little disjointed. There could also be many more examples in the book. The book provides an adequate number of examples, but could use more.
The first few chapters really spend a lot of time digging into the framework. Many times Grimes leads one deep down a path (such as boxing and unboxing) and others he refers to another chapter later (such as exception handling etc). It's a decent overview of .Net but requires one to read it over a few times. Many times it delves into the inner workings of .Net that might not be easy to grasp the first time through.
The second chapter starts looking at the framework classes, and gives a healthy overview of .Net's offering. Chapter 3 gets into .Net remoting and context. Overall I think chapter 2 and 3 are probably the best of the book.
Chapter four concerns itself with COM interop and COM+. This chapter is a good overview of what was done before and how it works in .Net. It is a necessary chapter, but I for one kinda glossed over it. The price of interop tends to be fairly high and to be avoided wherever possible. I think this is a great chapter, though, as I am sure I will need to do this at some point and this will be a good reference.
Chapters 5 and 6 concern themselves with Visual Studio .Net and how to build applications. Pretty good chapters, especially if you have not become familiar with the IDE yet. The section on tools and external tools are very important.
Chapter 7 is all about Visual C++.Net (managed and unmanaged). I think this is really a highlight as there are not many good books on Visual C++.Net. Grimes does an excellent job of describing the enhancements to Visual C++ and some features that have been widely ignored (ATL Server and Visual C++ unmanaged).
Chapter 8 provides an excellent overview of application development. Unfortunately the book does not cover ADO.Net or ASP.Net, but it makes up for it by covering many tricky areas of development like localization, and logging mechanisms.
Chapter 9 covers debugging. I wish this chapter was actually longer, but It does a good job of showing debugging techniques for .Net. This chapter is an absolute must read for any developer, as debugging techniques can not be over stressed.
Overall I think the book is very detailed and it should be in any serious developer's library. This is definitely not a beginer's book and does not cover many aspects of .Net development that are almost essential. Windows Forms, Remoting are covered lightly but really almost requires a book in and of itself to describe it correctly. I recommend this book, but be careful to do a self evaluation before you dive in. I have seen many senior developers read this book and not understand any of it. It is very clear about it's target audience being of a Visual C++ background, and it is not lying. I think it provides the best book for introducing those developers into .Net. Hope you enjoy this book, too. -- Reviewed by Mathew U.

I've read Richard Grimes' other works published by WROX, and eagerly looked forward to this one. While i found it technically very informative, the book claims to be targeted at "C++ Win32 Developers" but the vast majority of examples are C#. In spite of what everyone seems to think, the languages are not interchangeable, and I expected much more of a C++ angle. Am I the only C++ developer who feels C# is being rammed down my throat whether I like it or not?

Updated Review:
After a year of programming real world projects with .NET, I had to change my opinion on this book. As the author acknowledges, there is ALOT of existing C++ code and libraries. Trying to port existing code or using Interop techniques is not always the best solution. I'm glad to have a reference to Managed C++ that helps me compile C++ solutions to .NET(I would like to see a tiny bit more on mixed mode, c runtime linking, and C++ idioms that Just Don't Work). I still believe this is not the simplest book for learning C#, but those books have become a dime a dozen. This book is one you'll be glad if you need to using existing software.
Original Review:
Ok, I'm a C++ developer that has a hard time stomaching what MS has done to my beloved language. However, I am very interested in the .NET initiative( and C# ) and wanted to get the perspective of a C++ expert, especially one with a COM background. I read this book and found it quite good, except for the examples in "Managed C++"( in which there were many ). Granted, I was warned, but seeing C++ twisted like that reminded me of Bilbo's line ...butter scraped over too much bread... . The "Managed C++" examples were truly distracting. The author had to explain why the plumbing overhead, we learned to detest in COM, now exists in every line of code in "Managed C++"( my words, not his ).

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