Professional .NET Framework

Professional .NET Framework aims to explain what Microsoft Corporation's .NET initiative is all about from a technical point of view. The authors explain what it means for an application to run in the .NET environment, providing details on what code executes on which machine, where various resources come from, and how the .NET class library works. The book's goal--at which it's largely successful--is to explain how .NET systems work, without getting too deep into actual code. The code samples that appear here (and there are quite a few) are mainly for clarification. The authors based their work on the Beta 2 edition of .NET, which was pretty close to the final version.

There's a tradeoff inherent in multiauthor books like this one (Wrox Press publishes a lot of them). It is true that practically no one knows everything about a complicated subject like the .NET architecture soon after its release, and team authorship is a good way to achieve something like comprehensive coverage in a timely fashion. The downside of such books, however, is their irregular collection of writing and teaching styles, and the lack of cohesion across chapters. Individual chapters may be excellent (in this book, the chapters on the Common Language Runtime (CLR) and on components and controls are particularly good) but there's no unifying authorial voice. That's why you'll want to treat this book more as an encyclopedia to be consulted for information about particular .NET components, rather than as a tutorial to be read front to back. --David Wall

Topics covered: The Microsoft .NET software framework from an architectural standpoint. In addition to coverage of the .NET design as a whole, focused coverage goes to the Common Language Runtime (CLR) and its way of managing memory, classes, and compilation across multiple machines. There's also information on the .NET class library, the technique of remoting, and Web services under .NET.