The term ".NET" has been thrown around in so many different contexts, that it's unclear as to what exactly is involved in Microsoft's .NET offering. No worries, O'Reilly is here to set it straight.
First off, the authors begin with an explanation of some of the fundamental portion of .NET, the execution environment (the runtime). They explain how classes are generated by compilers, loaded and executed in the runtime. This includes a dissection of a simple example in IL (intermediate language) to illustrate that there isn't any ugly magic going on in the byte code, and that it is very possible to compile code to execute in the .NET runtime.
From here, the authors give a brief discussion of the major features of developing with .NET languages (currently includes managed C++, VB.NET and C#). They give code samples for the same sample class as it would be built in each language. Additionally, they dissect the IL that is produced by each compiler for C#, VB.NET and managed C++ to show you how the unified programming model is achieved with the different languages. Finally, they end this chapter with a sample of how to easy it is to reuse a .NET component with zero knowledge of the original language that was used to develop the component.
The next chapter covers deploying .NET components in depth. It covers all of the facilities that are provided by the component container including, versioning, remoting, transactions, pooling, security and queuing. The last 4 facilities are actually COM+ services (originally provided to COM components by MTS), and the authors are quick to note this and draw appropriate parallels to help apply your existing knowledge to .NET.
The next 4 chapters are very thorough overviews of each of the major .NET framework features: ADO.NET, Web Services API, ASP.NET, and Windows Forms. Each of these chapters covers exactly what you need to know to get your feet wet with the technologies and give you a head start in understanding and applying them correctly the first time.
I have no prior experience with developing for the Windows platform, in fact, I am a Sun Certified Java Developer. But this book told me everything that I needed to know about .NET to be very excited about it, and understand exactly why there is such a huge buzz about it. If you will be using .NET in the near future, or you just want to get an excellent view of what all the fuss is about, pick up this book, and it will all be very clear. This book answered many of my questions about how .NET works and why it will be so popular.
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