Introducing Microsoft .NET, Second Edition : 9780735615717

What problems does Microsoft .NET solve? What architectural approaches does it take to solve them? How do you start using .NET-and how do you profit from it? Get the answers to these questions and more in this entertaining, no-nonsense .NET walkthrough. The author, a well-known computer-science instructor at Harvard, covers a single topic from the top down so readers can choose how deep they want to go. Thoroughly updated and featuring five new chapters plus a new chapter available on the Web, this is the first book to read about the innovative .NET development platform.

Text offering a systematic introduction to Microsoft .NET, with a witty, jargon-free style. Each chapter covers one subject in detail, and features detailed diagrams, meaningful analogies and clear explanations. Code samples for the examples in the text are provided on the companion Web site. Softcover. DLC: Internet programming.

I always thought that the product now named Microsoft .NET sounded very cool. I remember reading Mary Kirtland's articles in the November and December 1997 issues of Microsoft Systems Journal describing what was then called COM+, a run−time environment that would provide all kinds of useful services, such as cross−language inheritance and run−time access control, to object programmers. As a COM geek, I liked the way this environment promised to solve many of the problems that kept hanging me up in COM.

Microsoft then decided that the next version of Microsoft Transaction Server would be called COM+ 1.0 and would be integrated into Windows 2000; what Mary had described would be COM+ 2.0. Later, Microsoft renamed COM+ Microsoft .NET, and I coined the term MINFU, Microsoft Nomenclature Foul−Up, for all this jumping around. But the product still sounded cool, and I was thrilled when Microsoft Press asked me to write a book about it with the same high−level treatment as I had given COM+ 1.0 in Understanding COM+ (Microsoft Press, 1999). You are holding, and, I hope, buying, the result.

About the Authors
David S. Platt
President and founder of Rolling Thunder Computing, David S. Platt teaches programming of .NET at Harvard University and at companies all over the world. He is the author of six previous books on programming in Windows. The first edition of this book is currently outselling Tom Clancy's Every Man a Tiger on Amazon.com. (That shows you what kind of geeks buy their books there.) He is also a frequent contributor to MSDN Magazine.

Dave holds a master of engineering degree from Dartmouth College. When he stops working, he spends his free time working some more. He wonders whether he should tape down two of his daughter's fingers so that she can learn how to count in octal. He lives in Ipswich, Massachusetts, and can be contacted at www.rollthunder.com.