Architect's Master Class

By Juval Löwy

November 2008, O'Reilly & Associates

Programming WCF Services is the authoritative, bestselling introduction to Microsoft’s unified platform for developing service-oriented applications (SOA) on Windows. Hailed as the most definitive treatment of WCF available, it provides insight, not documentation, to help you learn the topics and skills you need for building WCF-based applications that are maintainable, extensible, and reusable.

Author Juval Löwy, Microsoft software legend and participant in WCF’s original strategic design review, revised this new edition for the latest productivity-enhancing features of C# 3.0 and the .NET 3.5 SP1 Framework. This book also contains Löwy’s ServiceModelEx, a framework of useful utilities, tools, and helper classes that let you simplify and automate many tasks, and extend WCF as well.

By teaching you the “why” along with the “how” of WCF programming, Programming WCF Services, Second Edition, not only will help you master WCF, but also will make you a better software engineer.

By Juval Löwy

July 2005, O'Reilly & Associates

Since its publication in 2003, Programming .NET Components has established itself as the definitive reference to .NET component-oriented development as well as to the .NET Framework itself. Hailed by readers as the Rosetta stone for .NET and the Harry Potter for developers, now in a thoroughly revised second edition, Juval Lowy has updated this classic title to reflect changes introduced by the release of Visual Studio 2005 and .NET 2.0. The addition of generics, iterators and anonymous methods to .NET 2.0, as well as changes to the .NET Framework, provide new options for component development that are thoroughly explained in new examples and text. The book revisits and extends the numerous helper classes and utilities introduced in the first edition, as well as adding some two more years' worth of Juval’s original techniques, ideas, and breakthroughs.

Also included in the new edition are an introduction to generics, arguably the most useful addition to .NET 2.0; a C# coding standard, which many regard as the de facto industry standard for C# development; and a bonus set of helper classes and controls such as thread-safe Windows Forms controls and security controls that utilize the ASP.NET 2.0 credential-management infrastructure.

With its focus on .NET components and interfaces as the fundamental building blocks of .NET applications, the book continues to offer a unique and thoroughly modern approach to .NET programming. Programming .NET components is packed with helpful code examples, tips, design guidelines, pitfalls and original utilities that will simplify and speed up your work. For those committed to component-based development – and those wondering if they should be – this is the .NET book to buy and keep by your side.


Click here to read Chapter 3: Interface-Based Programming.

By Juval Löwy

September 2001, O'Reilly & Associates

There are two factors that make COM and .NET Component Services essential. First, .NET developers still manage many aspects of their application such as object instances, transactions, concurrency, security, asynchronous calls, disconnected work, publishing and subscribing to events, application deployment and so on. These connectivity or “plumbing” issues have almost noting to do with the functionality the end customer is paying for, and yet developers spend as much as 80% of their time on “plumbing” (and sometimes as high as 95%), instead of adding business value to their application. Not only that, but the majority of the bugs (and the time spent fixing them) are usually traced back to connectivity and plumbing defects, not to the business problem addressed by the application. COM and .NET Enterprise Services can basically take care and manage these aspects of the application, and let the developers focus on implementing the business logic. You gain not only productivity and faster time to market, but also quality because Microsoft has done excellent job in implementing these services, both in robustness and in performance. The second factor is the shift from Windows and COM based applications to .NET.  Both COM and .NET relies on COM+ (called Enterprise Services in .NET) for component services (the name COM+ is therefore misleading). .NET offers exciting new application frameworks such as Web Services, ASP.NET, WinForms, WebForms, and ADO.NET. However, adopting a radically new technology such as .NET is never an easy endeavor for companies and developers. Most companies have considerable investments in existing code base and development skills. Unless companies have a compelling reason to move to .NET or a reasonable migration path, companies will avoid .NET. Because COM+ is .NET component services, COM+ can offer such a migration path for companies and developers. Companies can start (or continue) their projects in COM, using COM+ as a supporting platform for component services, and then when the time comes to move to .NET, they start plugging into the same architecture .NET components, in a very seamless manner, reusing and interacting with their existing COM components.

 The book has a few unique differentiators from many other books:  

• The book focuses on the "how to" - practical explanations on how to apply the technology, how to overcome real life hurdles, design issues, and tradeoffs.
• The book discusses at length how .NET components can take advantage of COM+ services.
• The book describes the next version of COM+ on Windows XP.

Click here to read Chapter 10 - .NET Serviced Components.

By Michele Leroux Bustamante

September 1996, Wrox Press

This book fills the gap for Visual Basic programmers who want to know more about the underpinnings of how graphics programming REALLY works. Based on the Visual Basic 4.0 release, the concepts primarly focus on learning how to leverage the Win 32 API for memory management and the process of reading, writing and manipulating of graphics in memory. You'll learn how to work with palettes, create animations, write games, and build screen savers. Where other books simply list the API calls, this book describes how to get the most out of these techniques, without dwelling on the mundane and useless.

By Michele Leroux Bustamante

May 2007, O'Reilly & Associates

This easy-to-use introduction to Microsoft Windows Communication Foundation (WCF) is ideal for developers who want to learn to build services. Built into Windows Vista and Windows Server 2008, and available for Windows XP and Windows 2003, WCF provides a platform for service-oriented architecture (SOA) that enables secure and reliable communication among systems within an organization or across the Internet. With WCF, software developers can focus on their business applications and not the plumbing required to connect them. Furthermore, with WCF developers can learn a single programming API to achieve results previously provided by ASMX, Enterprise Services and .NET Remoting. Learning WCF removes the complexity of using this platform by providing detailed answers, explanations and code samples for the most common questions asked by software developers. .

By Brian Noyes

January 2006, Addison-Wesley

Data binding is a critical part of any rich data application if you care about productivity in developing your application. When you use data binding, you hook up user interface controls to data sources and let the controls take care of rendering the content. Data bound controls can also allow the user to interact with the data and make changes to it, and can take care of pushing those changes back into the underlying data source. Data Binding in Windows Forms 2.0 covers everything you need to know to build data bound user interfaces using Visual Studio 2005 and .NET 2.0. Data binding has been around in .NET since version 1.0, but significant improvements and new capabilities have been introduced in .NET 2.0 and Visual Studio 2005.

By Brian Noyes

January 2007, Addison-Wesley

Deployment has been a thorn in the side of developers for a long time. ClickOnce eases deployment of smart client applications, and thus has been one of the most eagerly awaited new features of Windows Forms 2.0. While an experienced .NET developer can learn the basics of ClickOnce in about fifteen minutes, problems arise when you start trying to apply ClickOnce in real-world applications, which invariably are more complicated than the classroom. This is the first complete guide to real-world use of ClickOnce, and gives a perfect balance of theory and practice – explaining how and why ClickOnce works the way it does, so that readers can then know how to apply and use ClickOnce in their own particular applications.

By Mark Michaelis

June 2006, Addison-Wesley

Essential C# 2.0 is a clear, concise guide to C#—including the features new to C# 2.0. The book clearly presents material for beginners and experts and provides contrasts and comparisons between C# and other languages. The C# language is covered comprehensively and each important construct is illustrated with succinct code examples. Complete code examples are available online. Mark Michaelis has organized the material for quick access. Graphical “mind maps” at the beginning of each chapter show what material is covered and how each topic relates to the whole.
Whether you’re just starting out as a programmer, are an experienced developer looking to learn C#, or are a seasoned C# programmer interested in learning the new features of C# 2.0, Essential C# 2.0 gives you just what you need to quickly get up and running writing C# applications.

By Dino Esposito

February 2008, Microsoft Press

With this book, you get the definitive guide to Microsoft ASP.NET—now updated for version 3.5. Written by a well-known expert, this in-depth guide focuses on core features as well as the latest capabilities. The book adds new chapters and revision to the book Programming Microsoft ASP.NET 2.0—Core Reference. New chapters cover LINQ and LINQ-to-SQL, new server controls such as ListView, DataPager, and LinqDataSource, Silverlight and, of course, AJAX extensions. In particular, you find one chapter dedicated to partial rendering and one chapter for script services and integrated WCF services. Silverlight coverage blinks at rich Internet applications but mostly focuses on v1.0 of Silverlight with a quick look at what’s coming up with Silverlight 2.0. With this book in your hands, you’re holding a reference to the state-of-the-art in ASP.NET and AJAX programming.

By Dino Esposito

May 2007, Microsoft Press

The book is aimed at explaining and motivating the paradigm shift that AJAX delivers to the world of the Web. The book covers the extensions to the ASP.NET platform to add AJAX capabilities to the next generation of Web applications. Readers learn about updatable regions and their internal mechanics, including triggers, progress monitoring, animation, and the client eventing model. You also learn all about strategies and solutions for building and consuming the back-end of an AJAX application. The book makes it clear that ASP.NET services are merely a way to implement the back-end of AJAX applications rather than stand-alone Web services that for some strange reason are to be local to the application. Full details are provided on the syntax required to call and consume remote services and page methods effectively. The book supports the ASP.NET AJAX Extensions v1.0 as released in January 2007.

By Dino Esposito

March 2006, Microsoft Press

The book provides an in-depth guidance to help professional developers achieve mastery of most advanced ASP.NET capabilities. With this book, you get the expert insights and pragmatic code examples you need to master the advanced features and capabilities for developing sophisticated Web applications with ASP.NET 2.0. The book explains HTTP handlers and modules, unveils the machinery of the ASP.NET runtime, shows off effective techniques for writing custom controls. It also provides a detailed overview of the configuration schema, provider model, and motivation and implementation of asynchronous pages, and all possible components you can write to customize the ASP.NET behavior. It should be noted that although labeled with an ASP.NET 2.0 sticker, this book is no way made obsolete by the release of ASP.NET 3.5. None of the topics covered by the book have been touched by the new release.