C# 2008 offers powerful new features, and Accelerated C# 2008 is the fastest path to mastering them, and the rest of C#, for both experienced C# programmers moving to C# 2008 and programmers moving to C# from another object-oriented language. Many books introduce C#, but very few also explain how to use it optimally with the .NET common language runtime (CLR). This book teaches both core C# language concepts and how to wisely employ C# idioms and object-oriented design patterns to exploit the power of C# and the CLR.
This book is both a rapid tutorial and a permanent reference. You’ll quickly master C# syntax while learning how the CLR simplifies many programming tasks. You’ll also learn best practices that ensure your code will be efficient, reusable, and robust. Why spend months or years discovering the best ways to design and code C# when this book will show you how to do things the right way, right from the start?

    * Comprehensively and concisely explains both C# 2005 and C# 2008 features
    * Focuses on the language itself and on how to use C# 2008 proficiently for all .NET application development
    * Concentrates on how C# features work and how to best use them for robust, high-performance code.

What you’ll learn
    o How C# works with and exploits the CLR
    o How to use arrays, collections, and iterators
    o How to handle events with delegates and anonymous functions
    o How to design and use generic types and methods
    o How to thread efficiently and robustly
    o How the new C# 2008 anonymous types, lamba expressions, and extension methods work and how to use them

Who is this book for?
If you’re an experienced C# programmer, you need to understand how C# has changed with C# 2008. If you're an experienced object-oriented programmer moving to C#, you want to ramp up quickly in the language while learning the latest features and techniques. In either case, this book is for you. The first three chapters succinctly present C# fundamentals, for those new to or reviewing C#. The rest of the book covers all the major C# features, in great detail, explaining how they work and how best to use them. Whatever your background or need, you'll treasure this book for as long as you code in C# 2008.

The Student's Essential Guide to .NET provides a clear and simple overview of Microsoft's .NET technologies. It is aimed at second and third year undergraduate students and postgraduate students on Computing or Computer Science courses who are required to look at a modern operating system, (Microsoft Windows 9x, Nt 2000 or XP) and to design and code simple or even not so simple examples. The approach is based upon the student's learning the technology of .NET through examples using the supported languages C#, VB and C++. The examples are based on fun, familiar games, and students are encouraged to review reference material to refine their skills on key aspects of the architecture. Review questions and worked examples enhance the learning process and the material is supported by the author's website, which contains extensive ancillary material.

* Student-focused treatment with many examples and exercises, together with solutions
* Integrates the use of .NET with the supported languages C#, VB and C++
* Authors supporting website contains solutions, source code and other extras

This book is for anyone who wants to write good C# 2008 code – even if you have never programmed before.

Writing good code can be a challenge, there are so many options, especially in a language like C#. If you want to really get the best from a programming language you need to know which features work best in which situations and understand their strengths and weaknesses. It is this understanding that makes the difference between coding and coding well.

Beginning C# 2008 has been written to teach you how to use the C# programming language to solve problems. From the earliest chapters, and from the first introductory concepts, you' ll be looking at real-world programming challenges and learning how C# can be used to overcome them. As you progress through the book the problems become more involved and interesting while the solutions become correspondingly more complex and powerful as C# features interact to achieve the results that you want.

By the time you've finished reading this book and worked through the sample exercises, you'll be a confident and very competent C# programmer. You will still have many explorations of the .NET Framework API to look forward to in your future career, but you will have a firm foundation to build from and you will know exactly where to go to find the things that you need to progress confidently in your projects.

This book has been designed from a practical, task-oriented approach so that the information taught is backed up with solid examples that confirm and extend the text. If you’re someone who prefers to get straight into your learning experience, rather than try to wade through thousands of pages of text, this is exactly the book you need. From the first chapter, you will be writing programs and learning how to use Visual Basic to solve common programming tasks.

If you’ve used the Basic language in its previous forms, you’ll appreciate the elegance and simplicity of this latest iteration, which is coupled with the most powerful library of functions and classes Visual Basic has ever been able to access. In addition, if you’re new to the language or new to programming, this book will introduce you to the important concepts and information you’ll need to get up to speed — by the end of this book, you’ll find that Visual Basic Express is so easy to learn that you’ll wonder why you haven’t been programming already.

This book is completely, unabashedly focused on the just released Microsoft Visual Basic 2005 Express Edition. From installation to deployment, everything that you can do in Visual Basic Express is discussed here so you can get up to speed as quickly as possible.

Identity and Access Management are rapidly gaining importance as key areas of practice in the IT industry, and directory services provide the fundamental building blocks that enable them. For enterprise developers struggling to build directory-enabled .NET applications, The .NET Developer’s Guide to Directory Services Programming will come as a welcome aid.

Microsoft MVPs Joe Kaplan and Ryan Dunn have written a practical introduction to programming directory services, using both versions 1.1 and 2.0 of the .NET Framework. The extensive examples in the book are in C#; a companion Web site includes both C# and Visual Basic source code and examples.

With this book, web developers can build engaging and interactive sites and applications using Microsoft's latest web development tools — ASP.NET 2.0 and the new ASP.NET AJAX framework. You learn to create applications that have all the great tricks you see on popular commercial web sites, such as order forms and the ability to interact with a database. And you can build pages that display information interactively without a page refresh. This straightforward tutorial explains how.

Learning ASP.NET 2.0 with AJAX helps you master the concepts and techniques of Microsoft's tools with plenty of annotated examples, review quizzes, web construction exercises and chapter summaries, so you can practice new skills and test your understanding as you go. With it, you'll learn to:

• Master the fundamental skills of ASP.NET 2.0 to build professional quality web applications
• Integrate new Ajax tools and CSS with ASP.NET 2.0 for flashier and more interactive sites
• Build applications with minimal coding using Visual Studio or its free counterpart, Visual Web Developer
• Connect your site with a database so that users can retrieve, interact and save data
• Debug your application, deal with unexpected problems, and protect your site from malicious users
• Use the community-maintained ASP.NET AJAX Control Toolkit to extend the controls that come with ASP.NET AJAX
• Use personalization tools to give your site a customized look for each user

Ideal for beginning web developers, or those who are new to ASP.NET, this book gets you involved with your own learning through hands-on lessons that are clear and to the point. You get the chance to try out new techniques on the spot. Want to join the world of modern web development? This book will get you started

With the spread of web-enabled desktop clients and web-server based applications, developers can no longer afford to treat security as an afterthought. It's one topic, in fact, that .NET forces you to address, since Microsoft has placed security-related features at the core of the .NET Framework. Yet, because a developer's carelessness or lack of experience can still allow a program to be used in an unintended way, Programming .NET Security shows you how the various tools will help you write secure applications.

The book works as both a comprehensive tutorial and reference to security issues for .NET application development, and contains numerous practical examples in both the C# and VB.NET languages. With Programming .NET Security, you will learn to apply sound security principles to your application designs, and to understand the concepts of identity, authentication and authorization and how they apply to .NET security.

If you program with ASP.NET will also learn how to apply security to your applications. And the book also shows you how to use the Windows Event Log Service to audit Windows security violations that may be a threat to your solution. Authors Adam Freeman and Allen Jones, early .NET adopters and long-time proponents of an "end-to-end" security model, based this book on their years of experience in applying security policies and developing products for NASDAQ, Sun Microsystems, Netscape, Microsoft, and others. With the .NET platform placing security at center stage, the better informed you are, the more secure your project will be.

The ASP.NET 2.0 Framework consists of two groups of components. The first group contains server controls, that is, those components that directly or indirectly derive from the ASP.NET Controlbase class. This group includes security controls, tabular and hierarchical data source controls such as SqlDataSourceand XmlDataSource, Web Parts controls set, data-bound controls, and so on.

The second group contains the rest of the ASP.NET 2.0 components including HTTP modules, HTTP handlers, HTTP handler factories, security components such as RolePrincipal, RoleManagerModule, role providers, MembershipUserand membership providers, data control fields such as BoundField, data source control parameters such as ControlParameter, ISerializable, schema importer extensions, and so on.

This book covers both groups of ASP.NET 2.0 components. In other words, this book shows you how to develop not only server controls, which belong to the first group, but also components that belong to the second group.

This book is aimed at the ASP.NET developer who wants to learn how to build custom server controls and components for the first time. No knowledge of authoring custom server controls and components is assumed. It  provides you with detailed step-by-step recipes and real-world server controls and components developed using these recipes to help you gain the skills, knowledge, and experience that you need to develop

• Ajax is one of the hottest changes in Web development methods in years; Microsoft's ASP.NET 2.0 AJAX (formerly known as "Atlas") provides Ajax add-ins for ASP.NET developers, and this comprehensive Wrox reference offers coverage of all the ASP.NET 2.0 AJAX pieces
• Readers will find the hands-on, code-based technical discussions they need on ASP.NET 2.0 AJAX client-side Framework, writing OO-style JavaScript code, using ASP.NET 2.0 AJAX client-side controls, ASP.NET 2.0 AJAX XML, and advanced ASP.NET 2.0 AJAX topics including how ASP.NET 2.0 AJAX uses the ASP.NET 2.0 server control architecture
• ASP.NET developers will learn to add Ajax techniques into the ASP.NET applications by prebuilding some of the underlying components and using a standardized tool-set

This book is for intermediate to advanced .NET developers who need answers to the hard questions on how to build high-performance ASP.NET applications. Authors Jeffrey Hasan and Kenneth Tu focus on how to make good design decisions for performance. They discuss how to develop applications with performance in mind. And they pay special attention to the tools available to developers to quantify and monitor performance issues and to diagnose performance problems more quickly.

Performance Tuning and Optimizing ASP.NET Applications provides a detailed review of how to tune and optimize ASP.NET applications for maximum performance. Currently, the market is being flooded with a slew of books on how to write .NET applications, but so far there has not been a title that is devoted to the more advanced topic of tuning and optimizing ASP.NET applications. There will be an increasing demand for this information as developers get comfortable with the technology and begin completing first versions of their ASP.NET applications. They will be looking for a book that dispenses with basic language tutorials, and instead tackles the real-world issues of performance.

Intermediate to experienced developers, who are either working on an ASP.NET development project or are about to start one, will find this book helpful for its concise information on how to design and write ASP.NET applications for optimal performance. The book focuses on performance tuning from a development perspective, rather than an infrastructure perspective. However, the book does address specific development issues that arise in common server architectures, such as Web farms.