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Introducing .NET 4.0 With Visual Studio 2010 Book Review

posted Wednesday, 10 February 2010
This book is a smorgasbord of .NET 4.0 goodies. This book does an excellent job of pulling all the new features in .NET 4.0 into one place. It covers the topics in enough detail that you leave the topic understanding what it is about and in many cases with references to find out more.

I am currently working as the SME on some of the Microsoft Learning tracks for Visual Studio 2010, so I have had to dig deep into Visual Studio 2010. I wish I would have had this book at the beginning of the project. I have not found anything missing as far as new features go.

Below is the table of contents from the book.

Chapter 1: Introduction
Chapter 2: Visual Studio IDE and MEF
Chapter 3: Language and Dynamic Changes
Chapter 4: CLR and BCL Changes
Chapter 5: Parallelization and Threading Enhancements
Chapter 6: Windows Workflow Foundation 4
Chapter 7: Windows Communication Foundation
Chapter 8: Entity Framework
Chapter 9: WCF Data Services
Chapter 10: ASPNET
Chapter 11: Microsoft AJAX Library
Chapter 12: jQuery
Chapter 13: ASPNET MVC
Chapter 14: Silverlight Introduction
Chapter 15: WPF 4.0 and Silverlight 3.0
Chapter 16: Windows Azure

The biggest ding to this book is the typos. Holy smokes, editors should not drink on the job. I won’t ding the book the book for that.

Another ding is that although they talk about code samples, I cannot find any. They give you the database they used throughout the book, but I have found no use for it without the code to attach to it.

All in all I recommend this book to anyone interested in getting up to speed quickly with the new features in .NET 4.0. It is nice to have them all in one place. It is also nice to have them in a book that does not cover every feature. For example an ASP.NET 4.0 book will have every feature in the 4.0 release along with all the past releases.

The book is definitely worth the purchase.

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1. Alex Mackey left...
Thursday, 11 February 2010 2:04 am :: http://www.simpleisbest.co.uk

Glad you enjoyed the book. Not a bad idea about the code examples. Most of the examples are pretty short anyway but I may compile some of the longer sections to avoid readers typing them in (especially now the RC is out). Re the typos - yes had a bit of a nightmare with editing. Most of the issues you see were not even in my original manuscripts! There is a revised e-version that will be available in the next few days that fixes these issues and will be available to everyone who has purchased the 1st edition print or ebook. You can read more about my writing experiences at: http://www.simpleisbest. co.uk/Blog/BlogEntryDetail/Mywritingexperiences/106.