There are 8,909 books listed on Amazon.com with the word 'Investing' in the title; there are(!) 27,146 books with the word investment in the title. Without having looked at a representative sample, I can be confident that Sturgeon's Law applies - I suspect if I sampled enough of them I would find that 90% greatly underestimates the amount of junk in this particular area.

Reviewers overuse the phrase 'required reading,' but no other description fits the new book 'Ajax Security' (2007, Addison Wesley, 470p). This exhaustive tome from Billy Hoffman and Bryan Sullivan places the specific security concerns of the AJAX programming model in historical perspective. It demonstrates not only new security threats that are unique to AJAX, but established threats that have gained new traction in the Web 2.0 era. It then details both the specific technical solutions and - more importantly - the mindset that are necessary to combat such threats. If you call yourself a professional web developer, you need this book.

BPEL or Business Process Execution Language is an XML and Web standards-based SOA (service-oriented architecture) standard that allows business people to combine services into automated processes. As described in this review, Active Endpoints' ActiveBPEL product family includes a visual designer that works by allowing non-programmers to assemble Web services into processes by dragging and dropping graphical representations of components (Web services) and 'wiring' them together in sequences and flowcharts.

Many requirements tools focus on accessibility and convenience features but fail to address fully the main issue that made use case analysis so successful: managing functional requirements and tracing them through the project development lifecycle. Functional requirements are often ignored or treated as a byproduct during broader requirements gathering. This is a serious misconception because functional requirements define the skeleton of the software system architecture.

It's 8:15 in the morning, and as you walk by the main conference room you overhear an animated exchange between the leaders of your IT organization including the directors of application development, production support, testing, and QA. Besides your applications team, you also see your company operations manager, the network manager, the lead analyst for the database team, and other assorted technical leads. One of your mission-critical composite applications is down and the finger-pointing is slowly escalating.

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.

One of my key tasks at Wine.com (the Magenic project for which we were awarded Microsoft's 2005 Worldwide Partner of the Year Award for a Custom Development Solution) was architecting a sales tax calculation Web service capable of supporting the tremendous volumes of traffic encountered by the main Wine.com Web site. The software package I used for this purpose was a Web service-testing package that just happened to have some load-testing functionality built into it. One of the things I like best about RadView's WebLOAD product is that it is 100 percent focused just on load testing - allowing for much more breadth and depth of functionality within this category. The way that the product works is illustrated in Figure 1.

Google will be bringing the Summer of Code (SOC) back this year. College students from around the world will be paid $4,500 by Google to work on Open Source projects, and Mono and DotGNU will be participating again, as will the WINE project (a Mono bridge is one option for a WINE project proposal), OpenOffice.org, GNOME, Beagle, and my favorite, the Mars Space Flight Facility (I spent my summer on Mars!) will also be mentoring projects (Google funds students to work on all the projects).

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.

With the release of Visual Studio 2005 in November Microsoft Visual Studio entered the enterprise development tools space with a coherent set of products targeted at the distinct roles in the software development lifecycle. On March 17 2006, Microsoft released Team Foundation Server, which finally enables users of the various editions of Visual Studio 2005 to achieve the Team System.

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.

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.

.NET 2.0 Generics is my favorite book of 2005. Well, other than Harry Potter anyway. This book is not for new programmers. To understand this book, I would recommend that you have about a year of programming experience, and at least six months with C++, C#, or Java. This book is well written and is best used as an introduction to generics, so it is of most use to an advanced beginner. The reader should be familiar the syntax of a C-derived language such as C++, Java, or C# 1.x, and be familiar with object oriented-programming issues such as inheritance, overloading, and overriding. No knowledge of generics is needed to make use of this book.

Most businesses require processes to function properly. There are different types of processes. Some processes are human-intensive, others machine-intensive, and the last type is a combination of the first two. Some examples of business processes are payroll, new product introductions, new employee hiring, etc. In most cases, these business processes require intervention from multiple entities and thus, are normally long running.

VMWare was the first software of its kind to offer the ability for one operating system to host others in such a way that users could be interacting with multiple operating systems simultaneously. Each virtual machine shares the host computer's hardware resources such as CPU, memory, network connections, and hard disks.

Recently, a client asked me to create a new .NET Web Service that would let them do sales tax calculations from any computer on their network. The product they had been using was an old-fashioned C program meant for a single computer.

Shortly before this magazine was launched, I was sent a product announcement for something known as WebZinc. The first thing I noticed about it was that the company producing it, White Cliff Computing Ltd., was in Yorkshire, England. 'That can't be a very common place for software companies to be based,' I thought to myself.

Microsoft has expanded the Visual Studio product line with the addition of six new Express products designed to help the student, hobbyist, enthusiast, or novice developer become proficient with the Microsoft .NET 2.0 platform as quickly as possible. Based upon the same code-base as their professional cousins in the Visual Studio 2005 product line, the express products have been on a diet, allowing them to be downloaded easily even when connecting to the Internet using a dialup connection. Microsoft has provided six express beta products, which are all freely available at h ttp://labs.msdn.microsoft .com/express/. The express product line consists of the following products:

Imagine that you've just been tasked with designing and implementing an enterprise-wide HR (human resources) system for your organization. The system will be implemented with an ASP.NET-based user interface, business objects based on COM+, and an ADO.NET-based data tier.

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.

Unlike other products that we've reviewed in .NET Developers Journal, Crystal Reports enjoys an almost unique relationship with Microsoft Visual Studio in that a copy of Crystal Reports has shipped with Microsoft Visual Studio since 1993.

Once in a while every software developer will find himself or herself using a file-differencing program such as Windiff.exe, which comes with the Microsoft Visual Studio .NET environment and its constituent languages, such as Microsoft Visual C#.

DotGNU is getting ready to make a big splash with the release of v0.1, including Portable.NET v0.6. Mono has released v0.28 with many new features, and Ximian has completed its contract with SourceGear.

It's all a question of balance. You can apply these words of wisdom to managing software development projects and to planning out the contents of a book, but it's still a tightrope walk.

DotGNU is offering $4,500 in prize money to people who write code for the Portable. NET Project's implementation of System.Windows.Forms (SWF). Version 0.5.12 of Portable.NET has also been released and is being prepared for the DotGNU 0.1 CD release.

Infragistics NetAdvantage 2003 Volume 3 is a suite of visual user interface components designed for both ASP.NET Web applications and Windows Forms-based applications.

It is an unfortunate reality that most software today is developed without any prior design or thought to software engineering best practices. This is analogous to a house builder showing up with a truck full of wood and a nail gun, and - thump, thump, thump - starting construction without any blueprints.

August was Mono's biggest news month ever: the Mono Project's sponsor, Ximian, was bought by Novell, a draft road map to the version 1.0 release was drawn, and Mono version 0.26 was released. In other news of open source, DotGNU plans to release version 0.1 of Portable.NET at the end of September.

I began reading Shared Source CLI Essentials with a rather high set of expectations. I knew that one of the authors, David Stutz, was an ex-Microsoft employee who had recently gone on record criticizing Redmond's attitude toward open source.

Microsoft has a rich history of development environments and platforms built around the creation of reusable objects and components to maximize developer productivity. These environments are designed to mask some of the underlying complexities of the platform.

In today's enterprise applications nobody is going to comment on the quality of your middle-tier components or the databases to which you persist your application's data. Enterprise applications, like all others, are judged using the age-old adage: first impressions count.

(October 1, 2003) - The first day of the .NET track at Web Services Edge 2003 got off to a great start today with an hour-long session - given by Empowered Solutions’ John Bristowe -- on Web Service Enhancements 2.0. Web Service Enhancements - or WSE as it is commonly known - is a Microsoft implementation for .NET of the WS-I standards for Web service interoperability. As John illustrated in his session, there are also numerous enhancements in WSE to make the job of the Web services developer easier.

Graphics and GUI (System.Drawing, System.Windows.Forms [SWF]) continue to be a couple of the most worked-on areas in both Mono and Portable.NET. Other areas under heavy development include cryptography, Web services, coverage and build tools for Mono, dependency charts for Portable.NET, and lots of bug fixes for both.

In a world where developers are baying for the attention of customers, very few people can claim to command that of the developer. Their blogs may be the only clue to the higher level of thinking at which they operate, creating the answers to when and why code works - in addition to the perennial how.

Microsoft Visual Studio .NET 2003 is arguably the most advanced integrated development environment (IDE) available today. Prepare to see your Visual Studio .NET environment on steroids!