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I have been so busy in May that I couldn't update the blog, not even to mention that my latest Microsoft Press book had been released and is now available on all major US bookstores. With fewer than 600 pages, Programming Microsoft Visual C# 2005: The Base Class Library is surely the shortest book I wrote. Not only that: it's also the book that took me less time to wrote. In fact, this book is basically the translation to C# of the second half of my VB 2005 book, more precisely of the chapters that have to do more with the .NET Framework and less with the C# language itself. Here's the Table of Contents:
1. .NET Framework Basic Types
2. Object Lifetime
3. Interfaces
4. Generics
5. Arrays and Collections
6. Regular expressions
7. Files, directories, and streams
8. Assemblies and resources
9. Reflection
10. Custom attributes
11. Threads
12. Object serialization
13. PInvoke and COM interop |
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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.