Normally, you might think that a 0.5 update to a piece of software is no big deal. In fact, the update from .NET 3.5 to 4.0 is a very big deal indeed. Moreover, not only are the changes to the .NET Framework substantial but so too are the changes to most .NET programmers’ IDE of choice, Visual Studio.
In this book, Alex Mackey takes on the task of covering all the essential details of .NET 4.0 and Visual Studio 2010 for a target audience of .NET 3.5/VS2008 developers. The assumption of a target readership with .NET and VS experience is important to note. There is no way that any author - or any team of authors - could begin to do justice to the vast scope of this IDE and framework in a book of just over 400 pages. Instead, Mackey sensibly concentrates on what is new and what is different.
The book kicks off with an opening chapter on VS2010. It highlights some of the new editing, IntelliSense, debugging and refactoring features. It then moves onto language changes in C# and VB.NET and provides a simple overview of the new dynamic programming capabilities of .NET 4.0.
Other sections of the book provide clear and useful descriptions of other new features such as parallelization and threading enhancements, the ASP.NET MVC (‘Model/View/Controller’) Framework, changes, the WPF 4.0 and Silverlight 3.0 (with just a brief section on Silverlight 4.0 which is now in beta) and Windows Azure for ‘cloud computing’. If this sounds a lot of ground to cover in one slim book, I should perhaps point out that there are, in fact, many more topics covered than I have even mentioned. You can see the full details on the APress site: http://www.apress.com/book/view/143022455X.
While this book doesn’t dig very deeply into any one topic relating to .NET 4.0 and VS2010, it does provide a great introduction to the new features. As such, it should be of interest to most experienced .NET programmers. I have to say that I have found it to be genuinely useful.
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