My new C# book has been released a few months ago, but I was so busy with my everyday activities that I didn't even blogged about it. Instead of going to the beach, today I sat down a prepare a home page for the book, from where you can download two sample chapters: Chapter 5 "Arrays and Collection" and Chapter 10, "Custom Attributes", as well as all the code samples and the errata doc.

At last I found the time to sort all the notes from readers, pointing at typos and mistakes in my VB2005 book, and to update the errata document that you can download from the book's home page. I have clearly marked the additions with a "New" marker. Most of these notes are typos that don't affect how code works, with the notable exception of the fix to the Evaluate function in Chapter 16 (regular expression).

My grat thanks to all the readers who took the time to write me to inform of the mistakes they found, with a special mention to Dan Karmann, who actually methodically proof-read the book and found about twenty of them.

Even though the book isn't specifically on the C# language, it adequately covers most of the new features of C# 2.0, such as generics, iterators, and anonymous methods.

Why a book on the BCL? Well, in these years I realized that far too many developers focus solely on high-level features - such as Windows Forms, ADO.NET, and ASP.NET - and often fail to leverage the full potential from other portions of the .NET Framework. For example, I have seen many apps that use verbose and unefficient validation rules that might be replaced by a single regular expression. Or apps that could be written in a fraction of time (and lines of code) if the author had been conscious of the full potential of reflection and custom attributes. Not to mention the fact that new .NET 2.0 features, such as generics, could make things only worse.

In general I find that most books that are "translated" from a different programming language are disappointing, so you might wonder why this book should be different. First, when I signed the contract for my VB 2005 book I already knew that the book would have been translated to C#, thus I planned the book so that its structure wouldn't be too VB-centric. Secoond, in the last four years I have been using C# in virtually all my programming projects - in fact I have surely written more C# code than VB code. For this reason, you'll find that the C# code is carefully optimized to use all the usual C#-specific techniques, such as iterators and anonymous delegates.

Shortly I will prepare a home page for the book on this site, with a couple of sample chapters. In the meantime, you can read more about the book (and hopefully order it) on Amazon's home page.

A few minutes ago I made all the code samples for Programming Microsoft Visual Basic 2005: The Language available on the book home page. It's a 7.5M download that contains several thousand lines of carefully crafted, optimized, reusable source code, including the following:

• a VB class that works with fractions
• a base form for simplified data entry
• a class to cache text files
• several custom iterators for better For Each loops
• tons of examples with generics
• two expression evaluators, the former built on regexes, the latter implemented via on-the-fly compilation
• a utility to display project statistics (a demo for regexes)
• a RegexTester stand-alone utility, to help you build, test and compile regular expressions
• an example of custom provider for My.Settings
• an example of how you can intercept ANY event from ANY set of Windows Forms controls
• attribute-based benchmarks
• a complete infrastructure for writing Windows Forms plug-ins
• an attribute-based library to write data-centric N-tier applications
• several Visual Studio macros
• Visual Studio visualizers for files, regex, and images
• .... and a lot more

On the same page you can also find an errata document for typos and mistakes found after the book went to print.

Enjoy the code (and buy the book if you like it! )

If I could get istantaneous results for the following simple two-question survey

1. Is Visual Studio the application that you use most often?
2. Did you ever use regex searches in the VS Find dialog box?

I'd bet that 80% of you would answer YES to the first question, but 99% of you would answer NO to the second question, which would be a rather weird result. Regex searches are among the most powerful VS features, yet few developers use them or even know that they exist.

IMHO, the real problem is that VS regex's syntax is completely different from the syntax you use with the Regex class, therefore using this feature requires that you learn yet another regex dialect. This is a bit too much for most developers. Microsoft should allow the standard regex syntax in this dialog: they could implement this change very easily and in a short time, without caring about backward compabibility issues.

While waiting for Microsoft to offer this little-big innovation, you can have fun with what you have today. Here are a few examples, excerpted from my new book Programming Microsoft Visual Basic 2005: The Language:

:i = :z   Search assignments of an integer constant (:z) to a variable (:i). In VB, but more rarely in C#, it can deliver false matches, when the = operator is used in an expression.

:i = :q   Search assignments of a quoted string constant (:q) to a variable.

(Dim|Private|Public) :i As String   Search for variable declarations of string type (VB only). You can easy adapt it to other data types.

Dim <(:Lu(:Ll)*)+> As   Search for local VB variables that use a PascalCase naming convention and therefore violate Microsoft's guidelines. (Local variables should use the camelCase convention.)

^:b*'.+\n   Search for comment lines in VB, that is, lines that begin with an apostrophe. (It doesn't consider the REM keyword.) You can replace the apostrophe with // to use this search pattern in C# as well.

Dim {:i} As (.|\n)#<\1>    Highlights the portion of code between the declaration of a local variable and the first occurrence of that variable in the method. You can repeat this search for all the local variables in a method and check whether you should refactor your code by moving the declaration closer to where the variable is used for the fist time. (See effect in figure below.)

As I anticipated yesterday, here is the TOC of my newest Programming Microsoft Visual Basic 2005, to be available in stores in early January.

Part I : The Basics
 1. Introducing the .NET Framework (12 pages): a quick overview of basic concepts in .NET programming.
 2. Basic Language Concepts (70 pages): modules, classes, variables, arrays, operators, etc. plus what you need to know about inheritance and attributes so that you can read next chapters, before chapter 8 and 19.
 3. Control Flow and Error Handling (40 pages): If, Select, For, For Each and other basic statements; error handling, with many not-so-obvious techniques to improve code efficiency and programming style.
 4. Using Visual Studio 2005 (56 pages): the many new features of VS2005 IDE, plus many old features that not all developers know; how to write a code snippet for VS2005; templates, refactoring, and a brief but intense tutorial on VS macros.
 5. Debugging and Testing (56 pages): breakpoints and tracepoints, data tips, how to write a cusom visualizers, trace commands and trace listeners (including custom listeners), benchmarks and profiling, unit testing, and code coverage.

Part II : Object-Oriented Programming
 6. Class Fundamentals (42 pages): the "usual" story about classes, methods, properties, etc. plus the new partial classes and operator overloading, all peppered with the description of relatively unknown programming techniques.
 7. Delegates and Events (26 pages): a small chapters with many details and secrets on how to use these VB features in real-world apps. It includes the new custom events.
 8. Inheritance (34 pages): inheritance at its best, including visual (form) inheritance and many real examples.
 9. Object Lifetime (28 pages): everything you might need to know about garbage collection, the Dispose/Finalize pattern, weak references, GC generations, object resurrection, and other advanced techniques that can take your app to the next level
10. Interfaces (28 pages): how to define a custom interface and, above all, how to leverage those that .NET provides you with, such as IComparer and IEnumerable.
11. Generics (40 pages): half of what you want to know about this new great .NET 2.0 feature (the second half is in chapter 13), including constraints, nullable types, and many examples of programming techniques that are based on generics.

Part III : Working with the .NET Framework
12. .NET Basic Types (50 pages): working with strings, numbers, and dates at their best, including many little/big new features of .NET 2.0
13. Arrays and Collections (53 pages): arrays, jagged arrays, "traditional" and generics collections, plus many tricks for writing less code that runs faster.
14. Regular Expressions (40 pages): a reference of regex syntax, plus many practical examples on data validation, data parsing, and even code parsing. If you aren't familiar with regexs you are missing a great occasion for writing better code in less time.
15. Files and Streams (42 pages): an overview of all the types in System.IO and the many new features in .NET 2.0, including ACL support, compressed streams, and the TextFieldParser type.
16. The My Namespace (48 pages): how to use the My namespace and how to extend it as you need.
17. Assemblies and Resources (44 pages): despite of their importance, resources (either simple or localized) are used rarely and unproperly by most developers; this chapter includes a complete description of the many important features added to NGEN.

Parti IV : Advanced Topics
18. Reflection (58 pages): there is a lot to say about reflection; among the many examples I wrote an app that generates code on the fly, a scheduler for undoable actions, and a universal comparer class.
19. Custom Attributes (46 pages): this chapter includes a few complete and nontrivial examples of how a custom attribute can make your coding simpler, for example by means of Windows Forms plugins and a framework for n-tier apps.
20. Threads (54 pages): the Thread object, asynchronous delegates, thread pool, the SyncLock statement, all the synchronization types, including the new Semaphore. Plus a section on threading in Windows Forms aoos.
21. Object Serialization (32 pages): binary and SOAP serialization, version-tolerant serialization in .NET 2.0, the new attributes for serializatoin, custom serialization, serialization surrogates, the IObjectReference interface, and more.
22 PInvoke and COM Interop (40 pages): How to interact with unmanaged code: calling "classic" DLL and Windows API methods; using COM components (including the new registration-free components); writing .NET components that can be used from COM apps.

As I already explained, this book isn't a mere VB 2005 reference. Better, in addition to being a complete reference book, it is a digest of the many programming techniques that you can implement by leveraging the features of the language and the .NET Framework 2.0, including generics, threads, reflection, custom attributes, serialization, delegate, regular expressions, and more. All descriptions aim to writing faster and more robust code. I looked hard for a similar book on the market before writing this one. I believe I finally wrote a book that does VB justice.

It has been a real tour de force, which kept me busy from May, summer included. Today I have completed the very last edit to PDFs, then everything goes to the printer!

Many readers are sending emails asking whether I was writing the 2005 edition of Programming Microsoft Visual Basic .NET. The answer is "yes and no". Yes, I am writing the new edition of this book, updated to Visual Basic 2005. No, I am not really writing a new edition of that book. The book I am finalizing this week is actually a brand new book, titled Programming Microsoft Visual Basic 2005: The Language. I decided to keep the title similar enough to the original one, to emphasize that the author is the same and that the approach is similar; however, I decided to added "The Language" postfix, to ring a bell in the mind of potential buyers who might otherwise believe that this is "just" an update to VB2005 and .NET 2.0. The new book focuses only on the VB language and the .NET Base Class Library (BCL). It covers both old and new keywords as well as topics such as .NET data types, arrays and collections, streams, reflection, serialization, threading, PInvoke and COM interop. It does not cover high-level stuff such as Windows Forms, ADO.NET, and ASP.NET, though.

I thought hard about the Table of Contents of this new book, literally for months. In the previous edition I managed to squeeze in "only" 1400 pages virtually anything you need to work with .NET Framework 1.1, including advanced topics such as serviced components and remoting, Windows Forms and Web Forms custom control creation, security, and so forth. However, .NET 2.0 is much more complex that 1.1, and I estimated that I would have either needed to split the book in two volumes or be less specific on most topics. Both choices were unsatisfactory to me.

Also, I couldn't help noticing that there are too many great books around about Windows Forms or ASP.NET programming, and a single core-reference book is bound to be less complete than those books with a narrower focus. Granted, a book from a single author and that covers all these topics can offer a unified view of what is important in .NET programming, but I am sure that developers who are deeply interested in a specific area will buy a book that specializes in that area.

While I was taking note of what else could be found on bookstore shelves, I found out that all these high-level books often overlook the basics, for example out to get the best out of the language or basic data types such as DateTime, arrays, and collections. Most .NET developers know how to write great Windows Forms or ASP.NET applications, yet they don't know how to optimize string-intensive programs effectively. And I am not talking about the usual String vs. StringBuilder example, I am thinking of techniques such as this, this, or this. Another example is memory optimization: you can speed up your code by an order of magnitude using caching techniques based on the WeakReference type, or by means of a correct Dispose-Finalize pattern. Not to mention advanced techniques based on delegates and reflection, such as this, this,or this.

In the end, I realized that I could write a very good book on just the Visual Basic language and the most important facets of the BCL. Rather than (or in addition to) being a plain reference for VB keywords and .NET types, this book is more similar to a complete compendium of programming techniques that you can implement with these features. For example, there is one entire chapter devoted to custom attributes, with a few advanced examples of how they can help you in the design of your n-tier apps. In other words, instead of just listing what are your tools this book will explain how to leverage them using intermediate-to-advanced techniques, including nonobvious techniques based on generics, on-the-fly compilations, advantage use of delegates and custom events, and so forth.

Another important topic that Programming Visual Basic 2005: The Language book covers is Visual Studio and how to take advantage of its many editing and testing features. The book includes two long chapters (112 pages in total) which covers basic and advanced topics, including macro creation, unit testing (with Team System), debugging techniques, and more. I have never found a language book that focuses on productivity inside the IDE and I hope this new book fills this gap.

The book consists of 22 chapters, for more than 1000 pages. I'll publish its Table of Contents in another post very soon, hopefully tomorrow.