This book is an update of an earlier version that was written for SQL Server 2000. It employs the Murach approach of dual pages that repeat and enhance the concepts being presented on each page. If you're new to SQL Server 2005 you'll gain a lot from this book. It has three goals: to teach T-SQL (Transact SQL), introduce you to the new .NET CLR integration, and introduce you to the new graphical user interface called SQL Server Management Studio that replaces the enterprise manager and query analyzer that were part of the SQL Server 2000 package of software tools.

Buy this book! I don't often give such a blanket endorsement but this book works on many levels. It's one of the few books that really addresses the needs of more experienced ASP.NET developers as well as providing a well thought out text that can be used by instructors. There's a plethora of things in this book that make it worthwhile. There are walkthroughs, code listings, in depth examples, and code snippets. There are 16 chapters and an appendix. At the end of each chapter there's a summary, exercises, key concepts, and references for further investigation.

This book contains 14 chapters and an appendix. Its subtitle is 'the ultimate ASP.NET beginner's guide.' As its two titles imply, this book covers the basics on a lot of ASP.NET topics. The chapter titles convey this: ASP.Net basics, VB and C# programming basics, constructing ASP.NET Web pages, database design and development, etc.

With the release of a major new version of SQL Server, it's incumbent on developers to take time to refresh and enhance their knowledge of this new version of T-SQL (Transact SQL) and stored procedure programming. The challenge is to find a good book that will cover the highlights but not give you a hernia in the process. Dejan Sunderic's book fits this bill.

I'm sure that there are times when you visit your favorite bookstore to look at new books on your favorite .NET topics and you cringe at the weighty tomes sitting on the shelves. You open these books and page upon page of continuous print swims before your eyes, but you figure it's important so you plop down your hard-earned money, take the book home, begin to read it in you rocker recliner and fall asleep.

Microsoft released VB6 at the start of 1999, which is almost 8 years ago. It's hard to imagine that there are developers who are still actively using VB6, but from the blogs and letters to the editors of many .NET magazines that I have read, it seems that this is truly the case.

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.

This is a big book weighing in at over 1,200 pages. Note the 'Pro' in the title. If you want to learn how to design Web sites, this book is not for you; it's meant for the professional Web designer needing to build serious, real-world Web sites that are scalable and secure. This is the complete book for the professional; it covers all the basic parts such as the history of ASP.NET, Visual Studio 2005, upgrading old projects, and WebForm basics, but these are covered fleetingly and assumes the reader already knows the concepts and has enough experience to figure out the details for himself. For those getting started in ASP.NET or Web development in general, I recommend Beginning ASP.NET in C# 2005 from Apress (ISBN 1-59059-572-6) or Microsoft ASP.NET 2.0 Step by Step from Microsoft Press (ISBN 0-7356-2201-9).

ASP.NET 2.0 contains a raft of new features that reduce the code you need to write and save you time and effort when building dynamic and interactive Web pages and applications. To illustrate this, and so that you get a better feel for the way all these features combine to provide the overall ASP.NET 2.0 development experience, this excerpt presents a scenario-based demonstration focused on a day in the life of a developer who is in the process of fulfilling the requirements of a fictional customer. Although this may seem a contrived approach, it actually follows the general process of evolving your applications to meet the needs of the users.

There are many ways to approach the presentation of a major upgrade to a software platform and how to address its various audiences. O'Reilly has decided that to get seasoned ASP.NET developers up to speed, it has added three new books to its Developer's Notebook series. The idea behind the series is to let existing developers 'look over the super coder's shoulder' and capture this concept on paper. The notebooks are example-driven, aimed at developers, and enjoyable to work through. Each chapter is organized around a specific task with examples reinforcing these new ideas.

This book is divided into three parts. The first part, 'Building an ASP.NET Page,' covers basic Web page development. The second part, 'Adding Data in an ASP.NET Site,' covers data in ASP.NET, including data providers, containers, data binding, grids, and viewing data. The third part, 'ASP.NET Infrastructure,' covers the HTTP request context, state management, caching, and security.

Mark Mamone is a program lead and solutions architect for British Telecom, and he's been involved in .NET since Beta 1; he's presently spearheading a Mono-driven project for BT. Mamone has co-authored several books, including Beginning Fedora 2, Beginning Red Hat Linux 9, and Professional Windows Forms.

Lately, it seems that every computer book that you find is a weighty tome of at least 500 or 600 pages. You groan just thinking about having to schlep another monster-size book around. It is so nice then to inform you that sometimes good things do come in small packages. This book, while only 200 pages, contains lots of nuggets that will appeal to all levels of developers.

You might be wondering what this book is all about. As the author explains, the dictionary's definition of a gotcha is 'an unexpected usually disconcerting challenge, revelation, or catch'. Mr. Subramaniam defines the gotchas in his book as 'those things that pop up unexpectedly when you're programming in .NET. ? In this book I focus on the .NET framework and features that have consistently exhibited behavior that was not obvious to me.' Mr. Subramaniam explains that the purpose of his book is not just to explain how to use a technology 'but how to use it well and do things right'. The book is intended for '.NET programmers in the trenches'. He assumes that you are fairly familiar with .NET and all gotchas are presented in C# and VB.NET.

What is required for true cross platform development using .NET? On one hand, not much; on the other hand, a great deal. Because Rotor, Pnet, Mono and (the Microsoft implementation of) .NET, are all based on the ECMA standard, getting a basic C# program running on all four platforms is typically just a matter of copying the .exe file to the machine and executing it (assuming a .NET framework is already on the machine). But what about remoting, serializing and deserializing classes, interoperability, using native code, and non-ECMA classes such as System.Data and System.Windows.Forms (SWF)? This book covers those questions in detail with good practical advice; but that is not the best part of this book.

The authors of this book, Edd Dumbill and Niel Bornstein, are well known in both the Linux and .NET communities, and are well suited to write a book on the Mono project. Edd Dumbill also coauthored Linux Unwired and XML-RPC, and is an Editor at Large for O'Reilly books. Niel Bornstein also wrote .NET and XML, and is now a consultant for Novell in the Linux and open source practice group.

If you are interested in writing computer games or simulations in .NET, then the Apress book 'Beginning .NET Game Programming' will prove to be a valuable resource. A trio of authors, notably David Weller, Alexandre Santos Laboa, and Ellen Hatton, wrote this book, which introduces the reader to many of the fundamental concepts that go into programming a game. All topics are illustrated in .NET using Visual Basic .NET or C# along with the .NET Framework managed wrapper APIs for DirectX and GDI+.

This book bills itself as the only ADO.NET you will ever need. This is a bit boisterous, but mostly true. This book covers pretty much all facets of ADO.NET programming, and covers them well. This well-written book can take an ADO.NET novice, and advance him or her to being an ADO.NET pro.

The 'cookbook' format has become quite popular in recent years as a vehicle for presenting ideas and code. Each chapter focuses in on a particular topic. Each topic contains a number of 'recipes' that build upon other recipes to present ideas that may be of value to developers. As with real cookbooks, the quality of these programming 'cookbooks' varies. Some cookbooks present only the entrees while others present a full-course meal. This book falls into the latter category. It is chock-full of recipes that as the authors state, 'help you quickly and efficiently solve many of the day-to-day problems you face developing Web applications with the .NET platform.'

One of the most powerful tools that a developer can use for validating data is the regular expression. A regular expression makes use of pattern matching to determine if an item fits within the definition of the pattern. Some validation that might take many lines of code to validate can be simply validated by building the correct pattern. However, many developers are put off by the feeling that regular expressions are too hard to master.

After reading this book, I spent a great deal of time trying to figure out where it fits in the ASP.NET scheme of things. The author states that the book was written because 'a lot of smart developers are having some problem making the transition to the object-oriented world of ASP.Net.' He says that this book is written for those developers who have worked with ASP.NET for a while who now want a book to help them understand 'the underlying concepts.'

My first big assignment for Magenic was described to me by one of our salespeople over a rather expensive dinner involving a copious amount of alcohol. For these reasons (reason #1: salesperson, reason #2: alcohol), by the end of the conversation all I really knew about what I'd be walking into was that it was going to involve a database of some kind. This distinguished it from other projects in pretty much no way whatsoever.

If you are a beginner and want to learn about creating XML Web services from a very structured and detailed perspective then you'll want to look at this book. The authors present the material by building a Web service that will validate credit cards. Each chapter builds upon the one before it to give the user a good foundation in creating Web services using both HTTP and SOAP protocols. The development tool used to build the clients and Web services is Visual Studio.NET. I recommend using Visual Studio 2003 because the wizard for adding Web references is much improved compared to the one provided in Visual Studio 2002. The examples can be downloaded from the Microsoft site and are provided in VB.NET as well as C#.

Now that ASP.NET has hit its stride, the number of books out that deal with it on an intermediate level has increased nicely. The problem, though, is that if the books all cover the same topics, how do you decide which one to buy?

Recently, one of our clients asked me to build some reports into an ASP.NET application that used SQL Server. I had no experience with report generators, but I did have some experience in building reports programmatically and did not want to get on the bad side of my client by billing a bunch of hours towards a report that is not flexible and does not do a lot of things that a reporting application should do.

The Compact Framework is not perfect. In particular, its class library represents an abbreviation from the Framework with which we are all familiar on the desktop. This means that in many cases, the classes and namespaces that one wants to use based on one's knowledge of the desktop Framework are not available for use on devices.

.NET and COM - The Complete Interoperability Guide is divided into four major areas: using COM components in .NET, using .NET components from COM, designing great COM components for .NET, and designing great .NET components for COM. A brief scan of the table of contents will quickly convey the wealth of material that has been compiled into this book. Adam Nathan starts out with an overview of .NET, managed code, and unmanaged code.

I took the 70-315 exam at Tech Ed 2004, which was held just two months ago in San Diego, California. I hadn't been planning to take it for several more weeks. However, I was encouraged to take it earlier on the basis of two key facts:

A very enthusiastic recommendation by Steven Mandel of a book for VB.NET developers - aimed particularly at beginning or intermediate developers - and a note by Dan Maharry about a useful desktop book on XML Schema.

Since 1997 the Unified Modeling Language (UML) has been the de facto modeling language for describing object-oriented systems, from requirements analysis to design and implementation. Since the first edition, UML Distilled has been the de facto guide for novices and experts alike using UML to describe their software development endeavors.