View Larger Image	Kevin Hoffman Sams, Paperback, Published May 2006, 1008 pages, ISBN 0672327767
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Read an excerpt: Chapter 4: Arrays and Collections       Reprinted with permission from SAMS Publishing. Copyright © Pearson Education, Sams Publishing. Written permission from the publisher is required for any use of this material.

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• Programming Languages : Visual C#
• Programming : Visual Studio 2005
• * Series - Int/Adv Users : Unleashed

• Sams

Setting the standard for a premium C# reference, Microsoft Visual C# 2005 Unleashed provides practical examples for virtually every aspect of the C# programming language. The book is structured for progressive learning, so it can be read cover-to-cover or used as a comprehensive reference guide. You will be exposed to everything from low-level information on the Garbage Collector to advanced concepts, such as creating applications that use Enterprise Services, creating Web Services, and even advanced Windows GUI. Chapters include:

• Expressions and Control Structures
• UI Controls
• Code Access Security
• Remoting
• Peer-to-Peer Applications

About the Author

Kevin Hoffman is an experienced developer and author, having written previously for the Wrox Design - Problem - Solution series. He creates Web services programs and other large-scale .NET applications in Houston, TX.

Aug 7, 2006     Art metz from Orange County, California
decent but not great
This book manages to be both too fast-paced to learn from and too superficial to serve as a reference or a guide. In the main it refrains from assuming that you use Visual Studio as your IDE, yet it does not provide enough information to compile and build applications with just a text editor.

The early chapters (Part I, "C# 2.0 Fundamentals") give a very fast introduction to the language, at a level appropriate to anyone familiar with a modern high-level language such as Java or Delphi. I wish it highlighted what is new in 2.0 more clearly, and had less contrived code sniplets to demonstrate the usage of selected features (such as generics), but overall this is a good overview of the language.

Part II, .NET Framework 2.0 Fundamentals, tries to do the same for the .NET framework. Here the 30,000-foot overview is less successful. For example, chapter 10 deals with multi-threaded programming but never mentions the BackgroundWorker class.

Part III deals with ADO.NET and starts to get meatier. In particular, the sections on "Using Schema Discovery" (in chap 17), "Accessing Data Asynchronously" (in chap 18) contain material that was new to me. Chapter 20 on "Strongly Typed Datasets" is particularly good. Chapter 21, using the new CLR features in SQL Server 2005, is far too brief and deserves far more than the twenty pages it gets here.

Part IV (ASP.NET Web Applications) is the longest section of the book, but the quality takes a nosedive. Suddenly the author assumes you are using VS.NET. He discusses client callbacks in chapter 22, but never mentions Atlas (except in a call-out at the bottom of page 322). His chapters on Master Pages, Web Parts, and Personalization are decent but add nothing to what I have seen in MSDN Magazine over the past year. His introduction to data-bound controls is far too brief. Chapter 29, Creating Custom ASP.NET Providers, contains the only extended code example in the book and contains the only significant typos I found.

Part VI, Windows Forms, contains a good section on the BindingSource non-visual control. The rest of this consists of a list of included controls and a grab-bag of unrelated topics (ClickOnce deployment, authentication, etc).

In summary, while this book is not terrible, I cannot recommend it. It tries to cover too much and winds up doing it so superficially as to be only marginally useful. I would recommend instead looking for separate volumes on C#, the .net framework, ado.net, asp.net, or whatever other topic floats your boat.

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