design and development

The difficult thing about this book for me is that I do hope that I can avoid C# all of my life and C# and C++ are given about equal time throughout this book. As the author points out on page 561, "C# is a wonderful language, but it often leaves you wondering if you can do more, and when you discover that you have reached the limits of the language, you realize it is time to get back to C++." Haven't we had enough of Visual Basic, and Java? Now C#? Why not C++? Why do we have to wade through explanations for both C# and C++ on every subject. If we spent as much time on a real language like C++ as we have spent over the years becoming multilingual we could be C++ masters. I always remember that, other things being equal, faster is better. And I have never seen any other language except Assembler come close to the speed of execution of C and C++. This book would be better if it were two different books - one addressing C++ only and one addressing any other would-be language.

In the Summary of Chapter 7, Mr. Grimes states that "All in all, C++ is the language for .NET development, and I hope that you, like me, will recover from a brief flirtation with other .NET languages and return to the best language for the job: C++."

In Chapter 8, Application Development, Mr. Grimes elects to disregard his own advice and gives every single example in C#. How quickly hope for a return to sanity was dashed!

I'm a big fan of both the DevelopMentor series (from Addison Wesley) and Richard Grimes' previous books, so I was very anxious to read this book. It was all the more disappointing, then, that I didn't particularly like it.

Mr. Grimes' previous books were very straight-forward and task-oriented. I'm constantly lending my copies to other programmer's to reference how to implement something in C++/COM. This book is not task-oriented (not that there's anything wrong with that). However, it didn't really work for me as a theory-oriented book either. Often, it seems to dive down into obscure detail on some feature that I didn't feel had been adaquately introduced. I would have preferred shedding some detail on some of the more obscure topics in favor of more complete examples.

I managed to make myself read the first 500 pages or so (always thinking that things would become better in the next chapter), but it was like pulling teeth. Finally, I set it aside and moved onto a different book (the excellent "Essential ADO.Net").

This is a gem of a book that is packed with insights not readily found elsewhere. Chapter 3 ('Context & Remoting') perfectly distills the subject in about 90 pages with clear code snippets. Chapter 2 on the FCL was well done (over 120 pages) with good code examples. The chapters on VS (IDE) was not extraordinary but acceptable. The frosting of the book was Chapter 7 on Managed C++, quote "It is time to return to my true love, C++". Ditto.