This book is one of the newest self-paced training courses from Microsoft Press. It covers the 70-536 exam (.NET Framework 2.0 Application Development) which is required for both of the new Microsoft certifications, the Microsoft Certified Technical Specialist (MCTS) (for Web, Windows, and Distributed applications), and Microsoft Certified Professional Developer (MCPD) (for Web, Windows, and Enterprise developers). It includes a DVD with a 90-day evaluation version of Visual Studio Professional Edition, a CD with a copy of this book in ebook form, sample code from the exercises in the book, and software for sample practice tests. The sample test software is from MeasureUp and has tests for each lesson, as well as an overall "certification" mode test. The individual lesson tests have a total of 162 questions, and the certification test has 302 questions. The test software has a lot of nice features, for instance, in addition to the certification test (45 out of the 302 questions to be completed in 135 minutes), you can set up custom tests with any number of questions, and the questions can be random, or selected out of questions you have missed on previous tests; you can also select the option of seeing the correct answer after each question. Finally, the book contains a voucher for 15% off the actual test; the voucher is good until the end of 2010, so you do not have rush to take the test.

The first chapter covers value and reference types, delegates, interfaces, and events. The second chapter covers files and streams, including streams, readers and writers, memory and buffer streams, compressed streams, and isolated storage (stores data without requiring the application to have direct access to the hard drive). The third chapter covers regular expressions, including finding and replacing substrings and reformatting strings. It also covers text encoding and converting between different encodings such as ASCII and UTF-8.

Chapter 4 goes into details on collections and generics, including classes for ArrayList, Queue, SortedList, BitArray, Stack, and generic collections such as Dictionary, LinkedList, KeyValuePair, and others. This chapter gives a good overview of all of the various ways to "collect" things using the .NET framework. It is enough to pass the test, but for a full understanding of generics, I would recommend ".NET 2.0 Generics" from Wrox Press (see review .DNDJ Vol 4 Iss 2).

Chapter 5 covers serialization using binary, soap, and custom formats. Chapter 6 covers System.Drawing based graphics including pens and brushes, images, and text, using simple pie and bar charts as examples. Chapter 7 covers threading including creating threads, sharing data between threads, thread pools, the IAsyncResult interface, and exception handling in threads. Chapter 8 covers creating, managing, and adding assemblies to application domains, and creating services. Chapter 9 covers using the application configuration file, the .NET configuration tool, configuration management, and creating installers. Chapter 10 covers the System.Diagnostics namespace including event logs, performance counters, the debugger class, traces, and the System.Mangment namespace. Chapter 11 covers application security starting with a long discussion of code access security, permissions, and declarative and imperative security. This is one of the better explanations of .NET code security that I have seen, and my favorite chapter in the book. Security is continued in chapter 12 with authenticating and authorizing users, access control lists (ACLs), and encrypting/decrypting data.

Chapter 13 covers interoperation with legacy COM objects and unmanaged DLLs. Using these techniques allows the switch to .NET to happen one piece at a time. Chapter 14 gives a short introduction (too short in my opinion) to reflection.

Reflection allows code such as new classes to be created at runtime; it also allows an application to find information about assemblies, classes, and types at run time as well.

Chapter 15 covers the new System.Net.Mail namespace, including how to create text and HTML mail messages, include images, attach files, send the resulting email, and monitor for delivery success. This chapter was a lot of fun.

Chapter 16 covers globalization and shows how to access culture and region information, the formatting of dates and numbers, and culture sensitive string comparisons.

This book is a reasonable value; the high price is justified by the size and quality of the book, the included test software, the trial version of Visual Studio, and the 15% off voucher. This book is a must for anyone planning on taking the 70-536 .NET Framework 2.0 Application Development Exam. This book gives a balanced overview of the entire .NET 2.0 framework, and will be helpful as a reference, and in getting an understanding of what is included in .NET 2.0. However, other than the first chapter on basic data types, none of the chapters goes into enough depth to cover any of the topics well. Still the breath and quantity of information included in this book should earn it a place on most developer's bookshelves.

Tony Northrup, Shawn Wildermuth, with Bill Ryan
Publisher: Microsoft Press
ISBN: 0-7356-2277-9
Price: US $69.99