Introducing .NET 4.0: With Visual Studio 2010 (Expert's Voice in .NET) [Paperback]

Introducing .NET 4.0: With Visual Studio 2010 is a book that many day-to-day developers will benefit from. It provides a great overview of what's new in .NET 4.0 and Visual Studio 2010 - an obvious statement I know, however what sets this book apart is the fact that it makes reference to the new 4.0 content with references to both the earlier 3.5, 2.0 and 1.1 material. You'll also find that the author chooses to refer to the Microsoft Developer Network (MSDN) documentation using URLs as opposed to either copying the information verbatim or paraphrasing it some way: a refreshing change. This means that for much of this book, you are presented with straight-to-the-point information about the highs, the lows and the gotchas to look out for when you are building applications using Visual Studio 2010 and the .NET 4.0 platform. If you need a book that covers the salient technical points without going into huge amounts of detail, this is the book for you.

Alex is an experienced developer, he discusses his own personal experiences with many of the .NET 4.0 technologies, providing us with an insight into their history, their strengths and weaknesses - it's all valuable content that can be hard to source elsewhere. And what's more, given that this is Alex's first book, he has done a terrific job: his writing style is contemporary, elegant and is easy to read.

Why should I buy this book?
Don't be put off by the use of "Introducing" in this book's title. It's a book all developers should buy, from beginners to seasoned professionals. Beginners will benefit from the coverage of features, Alex essentially provides a roadmap of the things you need to look at in .NET 4.0 in order to gain the most benefit.

What's in it for me? What's this "roadmap" you mention?
Alex covers all of the bases with chapters about the following topics: Visual Studio IDE and MEF, Languages and Dynamic Changes, CLR and BCL Changes, Parallel, Workflow Foundation 4, Windows Communication Foundation, Entity Framework, WCF Data Services, ASP.NET, Microsoft AJAX Library, jQuery, ASP.NET MVC, Silverlight Overview,WPF 4 and Silverlight 3 and Azure. This should provide you with a one-stop shop regarding the current .NET 4.0 technologies and tools: a great resource, especially for newbies, those developers moving to .NET 4.0 from the Java world, etc. and experienced developers looking to make use of new material in their applications.

One of the most common questions I get asked at developer events is "how do I get to know .NET?" - this book is a great source of up-to-date information, "newbies" and those moving to .NET 4.0 from other platforms should rush out and buy this book. Seasoned developers will enjoy the to-the-point writing style, the short code examples and the author's reach out to "subject matter" experts from the field - if you need to know more, the links are there for newbies and long-in-the-tooth developers!

This book sits nicely in between Pro C# 2010 And The .NET 4.0 Platform 5th Edition by Andrew Troelsen (Hardcover - 3 Mar 2010) and Pro ASP.NET 4.0 In C# 2010 4th Edition by Matthew MacDonald (Paperback - 3 Mar 2010). Alex's book provides all the groundwork you'll need in order to be able to tackle the works of Troelsen and MacDonald - Alex's book is available now!

What are you waiting for? Visual Studio 2010 will be released in a few months time! Get ahead now, buy this book, you won't regret it!

Very good book, it assumes you've got some experience of VS2008 so it's probably not a book for beginners. It summarises the huge amount of new stuff. Essentially, it's telling us what's there, what's new, giving us a high level overview without trying to give a detailed tutorial or exhaustive documentation on any particular feature.

It includes many short interviews with various experts on particular features and the author considers why particular features might be useful and what's worth spending time on.

So it's quick to read and very good value for time in understanding what's new and seeing what might be worth looking into in detail.

I found this book to be an excellent source of insight to the topics it covers. Alex provides a clear and easily readable introduction to these technologies and how they may be useful.

Don't be put off by the "Introducing" part of the title. This is not a book for developers who are new to Visual Studio and the .NET Framework. Rather, it is a book for those who have worked with earlier versions of these tools and want to find out what the new versions contain.

While I was familiar with some of the topics in the book I found it very informative and have learnt a lot from reading it.

If you are a developer working with .NET I can only think of 3 reasons not to buy this book:

1. You are confident that in the rest of your career you will never use anything other than the tools you are currently using. (Unless you plan on retiring soon I can't imagine this being the case.)
2. You already know everything about ALL the topics it covers. (In which case you could probably write your own books on the subject.)
3. You have it already.