Introducing Microsofta .Net

From the foreword: "a high level and easy to understand overview of a subject with some code...funny to read and very informative, with lots of interesting code...about teaching you the mindset of .NET."As a hobbyist/beginner programmer I found Platt's book very interesting and very easy to read. One question I've had is just what is this '.NET thing' and what does it hold for the future of computer usage/programming?.NET has been for me an elusive something that even Microsoft seems to have difficulty defining in an easy and succinct way.Platt has provided just that, an entertaining and informative overview of the .NET mindset. He provides an introduction to .NET objects and the good code needed to run on various platforms and solution architecture, IL and JIT and .NET Namespaces, OOP features and memory management.ASP.NET pages, web controls, and secuirty. .NET Web services--writing web service clients and the WSDL file. Windows forms--controls and events, hosting ActiveX controls are all looked at in easy to understand--hey that makes sense to me!-- language.Platt uses a problem background--what problems does MS.NET solve? and solution architecture with simplest example method of exploring the 5 topics covered. He covers a single topic from the top down in each chapter, starting simpler and then progressing into greater technical detail with a minimum of jargon and a maximum of wit. Platt uses many detailed diagrams and analogies and clear explanations along with code samples--written in VB.NET--more samples are provided on the book's web site. When I finished this 200 page easy to read book I learned enough about this development platform to understand a little better the future of software as a service and what this '.NET thing' is.Let me recommend this book as an excellent introduction to the 'mystery' of what .Net is all about.

This book is a very good BRIEF and HIGH LEVEL overview of .Net. And a pleasure to read. It is mostly tailored to pre-.Net VB programmers, but may also be useful for Java programmers interested in this technology.The author assumes that his readers do have some experience, primarily with VB. It is not a tutorial, neither a how-to book, so people with little or no prior experience with programming will not benefit from it. I particularly liked authors approach to start every chapter with describing a problem that programmers faced in pre-.Net world, and then explain how .Net attempts to solve this problem. This really puts all featurs covered by the book into right context and helps understand .Net as a solution architecture built on top of prior technologies, and not as a stand-alone piece of software wizardry.Highly recommend this book to managers that have previous coding experience.Do NOT recommend it for managers without it, as the book heavinly relies on code examples.

This is an excellent book if you are a completely ignorant as far as .NET is concerned but have a good understanding of general programming concepts. Would be a good read for technically literate management. However if you intend to become fully proficient you will probably need another book in addition to this one.

Read the title. Introducing Microsoft.NET. This is exactly what the book sets out to do, and that is exactly what the author does. The author takes this huge and often misrepresented framework and shows the reader whether developer or manager, admin or advanced user how this paradigm shift at Microsoft is extremely important to them.What is not in the title, and what makes so many give this book poor reviews, are the words "Developing", "Programming", or "Architecting". Other book are left to handle the specifics of these tasks. This book is about understanding the Why of .NET, and not its How.And regarding its price. I do not value a tech book by how many pages its author spewed out, but by how well it meets its objectives, how applicable it is to my career, and how well the author conveys his message. This book is well worth the price, and if you don't earn the cover price back many times over, you must have changed to a non-IT career.This book is a must read for anyone who can't figure out what .NET is, or who thinks they understand it from the hype. The book is objective and concise, and while there are many stories of yore, they are necessary to understand .NET's place in correcting the flaws of past programming environments, and therefore its role in the future of computing.

Firstly, I have been working with .NET since early Betas so have seen through a number of .NET stages of life. And the author David Platt teaches Harvard graduate courses. Recently I went through a week long training with the author and that is how I was introduced to this book and to him.So, what I would like to say is that in this book, even though the author calls it an introduction, that is so very humble. Any developer working on Micro$oft's toolset will realize that a book, which in its first chapter, goes through COM Interop and gives working samples of using COM components in .NET and vice verca cannot be called a manager's introduction. Now, for those guys who still think that is a "manager's introduction", may I ask how many "typical development" managers can just go in and understand the ins and outs of a COM interop sample?COM by default, has been hard, and from what I have seen, typically managers avoid understanding the "real" details of the same. (e.g. how IDispatch really works with or without type libraries or what are the 18 or so OLE interfaces used in an Activex control or how DCOM talks over internet and what is the difference between a COM+ component and an MTS component etc.)Then the author gives very interesting and practical examples of using ASP.NET authentication/authorization and *encryption*. Again I guess most books on just this one topic ASP.NET may spend several times the volume of this complete book and still not cover this level of details effectively in such a small set of pages. Then let me give another example. David in chapter 4 gives some excellent inside information about web services and gives a very interesting sample of using chunkiness in web services. Again, this is not for the light-hearted as most books on .NET with a lot more pages in them don't cover details any more than basic how to write a web service (Which is trivial as it can be made via a wizard or else one can write one in 5 minutes or lesser by hand!) And btw, I love its samples because they are all very interesting considering that the author has worked closely with Microsoft on technical documentations.