So, you are a seasoned C# 1.x developer very much looking forward to learning the lean mean C# 2.0? Great! But as much as you want to learn the new language enhancements, you despise the fact that any book you pick seems to start teaching you the same old things over and over again; all the features you already knew (or should know); the for loop, the if statement, basics of OO; and therefore you'd have to skip several hundred pages to get to learn a new feature...that is painful.

Like you, I was looking for a book that would teach me the delta, i.e. the differences and enhancements to the new language and not the features that I already know as a C# developer for several years. Written with this upgrade-only concept in mind, seasoned author Jesse Liberty's "Visual C# 2005" came to the rescue. As series creator Bret McLaughlin says "People don't have time (or the income) to read through 600 page books, often learning 200 things of which only about 4 apply to their current job.” This book is the right choice for today’s busy developer who wants the right value for his time.

From the very beginning, this book is focused on explaining generics, iterators, anonymous methods, partial types, static classes, nullable types, limiting access to properties, delegate covariance, contra-variance, enumerators, etc: Concepts you'd want to learn as these are new to C# 2.0. The next chapter talks about IDE enhancements (not necessarily a language feature but it helps), visualizers, refactoring and debugging tools provided with Visual Studio .NET 2005. It just gets better: Web apps, data-driven forms, asynchronous tasks, one click deployment...you name it. In a little over 200 pages, it is a concise upgrade guide to C# 2.0 and Visual Studio.NET 2005 enhancements to support this update.

A Developer's Notebook also talks about security controls, personalization, authentication, master pages, themes, and other ASP.NET enhancements you'd find ubiquitous in all ASP.NET 2.0 books, but without the fluff. I made myself sound almost like the marketing person for O'Reilly but the truth is that I found this book really exciting. As Bret further said "the often-frantic scribbling and notes that a true-blue alpha geek mentally makes when working with a new language, API or project. It's the no-nonsense code that solves problems...." See it for yourself; download the source from http://www.libertyassociates.com/pages/Books.htm and check out code samples, labs, and reference links.

I've also just recently attended Juval Löwy's workshop on Visual C# 2.0 at the DevConnections 2005 conference held in Las Vegas. Along with the conference notes handout, I used A Developer's Notebook as a follow-up reference. Example labs like CreateATypeSafeList, GenericEnumeration, and ImplementingGenericInterfaces were similar to some of the demos performed at the conference. Also, the author, Jesse Liberty is a Microsoft .NET MVP and author of Programming C#, Programming VB 2005, Programming ASP.NET, Programming .Net Windows Applications, and various other books, which explains why the book is so cohesive and contemporary.

Like any other book, it has some shortcomings too. For instance the level of detail in certain topics, but the link section covers references if you are interested in learning more about a specific subject. I think this comes hand in hand with being to-the-point and concise.

If you are not an existing C# developer or want to learn old language features over again, this book is NOT for you. However, if you want to adapt to the new awesome features of C# 2.0 without further ado, there is only one thing to do: Add to cart!

Long awaited Jeffrey Hasan’s Using the Web Services Enhancements 2.0 is finally out. Developing distributed applications has become an increasingly indigenous part of a present-day developer's software life cycle. XML web services provide us an easier and standardized way to facilitate distributed communications. Service orientation takes this to another level, i.e. standardizing loose coupling of these services via contracts. Hasan's book provides answers for today's enterprise needs to learn and formulate their existing distributed communication frameworks as they shift towards Service Oriented Architecture.

This book is about technology we can implement today; it's neither a superficial overview of terminologies nor is it a manager's guide or executive summary. Expert Service-Oriented Architecture in C# is the answered prayer of various developers like me who were looking for a book that comprehensively addresses SOA in Microsoft .NET and couldn't find much help. There are only a handful of books out there on this thriving discipline, Service Oriented Architecture, and most of them fall short in technical implementation details. Most importantly it answered my own skepticism of having another fancy TLA (three-letter acronym) and how it can change the way we program distributed apps today. You'll have to read it to get the answer. Hasan acquired a masters degree from one of the top ten U.S. schools and you'll see the academic excellence in his writing. His technical fluency, vocabulary, and in-depth explanation are salient features that give this cutting edge technology book priority over its counterparts, if there are any.

Expert Service-Oriented Architecture isn't just a good read about SOA but as its title depicts, also a great reference for WSE 2.0. Individual chapters are categorized in a way that each chapter covers a topic of interest; WS-Security, Policy Frameworks, WS-Addressing & Routing, Design Patterns, and so on. Therefore it provides an excellent reference for WSE 2.0, a fairly new release from Microsoft providing support for the latest developments in the Web Services arena. Examples in this book are simplified but not trivial, simpler but not marginal, and the style shows them coming from a software developer who has encountered real world application architecture challenges. Jeffery touched various important topics concisely which a developer encounters either in practice or theory; for instance RPC vs. document literal invocation, web services building blocks, digital signing with x.509 certificate, integrating web services and MSMQ, XML schema definition, etc. The last chapter, beyond WSE 2.0, I found very interesting since it addresses Microsoft's new breed of communications infrastructure built around the Web services architecture and code named "Indigo". WSE 2.0 is here for a relatively small period of time until Indigo kicks in with support for secure, reliable, and transacted messaging along with interoperability. However, future proofing the applications is what Hasan explained in this book, and you have to read it to know it--like Emerson said "Nature and Books belong to the eyes that see them."