.NET From India

Visual Basic 2008 HowTo

I was a technical reviewer for this book. So this is not a completely objective review :). But I think if you are someone who is starting off with programming and need to get up to speed with VB 2008, then this will definitely be a very good book to start off on.

It is aimed at college students to be used as a part of a course. So you will find a number of exercises at the end of each chapter etc. But it also covers a lot of ground from a technical standpoint. It covers all differnt kinds of applications, ie. Console Applications, Winform Apps, ASP.NET Web apps and even some of the newer technologies like WPF and Silverlight.

The other thing is that it is based on the Express Suite of IDEs, so you can use this to learn VB on a budget, without the need for the full Visual Studio 2008 IDE.

Book Review - ASP.NET 2.0 - A Developer's Notebook

If you are working on ASP.NET now and want to get to speed quickly to ASP.NET 2.0, then this may be a good book to try. This book from O'Reilly is not aimed at new ASP.NET developers, but rather people who just want to learn the new ASP.NET 2.0 features.

The book is an very easy read and cleanly written, covering most of the new ASP.NET 2.0 features like Master Pages, Themes, Web Parts etc. It contains a lot of pictures and screenshots and is written in a single step at a time format. This means you can actually code as you read the book and learn the new features. Another advantage is this style is that if you are just interested in a particular feature, you can just skip to that chapter and read through without any difficulty.

But this approach also has its disadvantages. It can sometimes seem too long and it takes quite a few steps to actually get to the meat of the stuff. So if you are the impatient kind, you may find this book a bit too slow. And I personally do not find the margin notes very useful, but I suppose preferences vary.

Book Review: Peer-to-Peer with VB.NET

A few months back I had a long talk with Sriram, on doing P2P for one of the .NET applications we were thinking about. We took a look at the MS P2P kit, but were disappointed as it was pure COM/C only, with no managed interface.

I got this book that talks about P2P with VB.NET. A nice and clear approach, the book starts introducing P2P and takes you through the different approaches you can take to create a P2P application. It also covers some of the most common P2P technologies available out there and also how you can do it from scratch with .NET.

I would have liked it better if the author had spent some more time with the Windows P2P kit.

If you are into P2P development and .NET, this book is of course a must read. It may even be a good read if you are working on networked applications, as there is a lot of information on networking and remoting with .NET in this book.

Book Review: .NET Security and Cryptography

Security is the new buzz word in the industry nowadays. This book .NET Security and Crytography is co-authored by an Indian MVP Arun Ganesh, who was good enough to give me a copy of this book, when he was here last time.

Well, I was quite suprised that he choose to write on a subject that, though it includes the buzz word of "security", is still considered niche by most application developers. And the authors make no pretence of this being a normal run of the mill book. They are very specific it is a practical guide to writing secure code and cryptography.

Well the book is quite exhaustive and covers all you can think of in the subject area. They cover everything that you will need to know if you are working with encryption of any kind in .NET.

My recommendations - If you are new to .NET or learning .NET, dont even go near this book. It may frighten you. But if you are comfortable with .NET and are working on apps where you need to securely store data, then this book may be the best bit of advice you can get.

Book Review - Best Kept Secrets of .NET

I have been reading an advanced review copy of the book called "Best Kept Secrets of .NET" by Deborah Kurata. Quite an interesting attempt, as this in not one of the normal run of the mill technology books. This book attempts to give you all the small tips that would make you more productive and also increase the quality of your output.

The book consists of 5 major chapters, that cover, VS.NET, Winforms, ADO.NET, Coding Tricks and Error handling and recovery.

The book does not attempt to be a guide to help you learn .NET, though Deborah has tried to do introduction to technical stuff wherever possible. So I would say, if you dont know .NET, this book may not be a good starting point. If you already work with .NET, then this book may help you a lot.

I was suprised to learn that there are 12 different ways to do a search in VS.NET. Seems to be way too much to do a simple search.. :-)

Can this book be one that you can read end to end? Well I doubt it. Though it is not very difficult to read, it can be too much for a continous read. Most probably this will not be the most productive use of the book as you would have forgotten half of what you read by the end. So I would really recommend that you have this near you when you code and slowly start using tip by tip so that you start taking advantage of a lot of those shortcuts and best practices this book is filled with.

This book is Published by apress