Simply put, you will find that ASP.NET 3.5 is an amazing technology to use to build your Web solutions!
When ASP.NET 1.0 was introduced in 2000, many considered it a revolutionary leap forward in the area
of Web application development. ASP.NET 2.0 was just as exciting and revolutionary and ASP.NET 3.5 is
continuing a forward march in providing the best framework today in building applications for the Web.
The first computer programming book I read was entitled Programming Windows 3.0 by
Charles Petzold. This was around the time when Microsoft Windows 3.0 (circa 1992) once and
for all showed the industry that Microsoft was a company with a future. Writing code for Windows
back then was complicated by many things: lack of documentation, 16-bit architecture, and the
necessity of buying a compil er separate from the software developm ent kit (SDK). Charles’s
book tied everything together and solved the problem of how to write a program for Windows.
Now the problems are quite the opposite: we have too much documentation, we have
64-bit architectures, and everything in cluding the kitchen sink is thrown into a development
environment. Now we need to figure out what we actually need. We have too many options—too
many ways to solve the same problem. What I am trying to do with this book is the same thing
that Charles did for me when I first started out, and that was to help me figure out what I needed
to write code.
This book is about explaining the C# programming language in the context of solving prob-
lems. C# has become a sophisticated programming language that can achieve many goals, but
A Programmer’s Introduction to C# 2.0(Third Edition)
ERIC GUNNERSON AND NICK WIENHOLT
The .NET Runtime Environment
In the past, writing modules that could be called from multiple languages was difficult. Code
that’s written in Visual Basic can’t be called from Visual C++. Code that’s written in Visual C++
can sometimes be called from Visual Basic, but it’s not easy to do. Visual C++ uses the C and
C++ runtimes, which have specific behavior, and Visual Basic uses its own execution engine,
also with its own specific—and different—behavior.
And so the Component Object Model (COM) was created, and it has been pretty successful
as a way of writing component -based software. Unfortunately, it’s fairly difficult to use from
the Visual C++ world, and it’s not fully featured in the Visual Basic world. And therefore, it was
used extensively when writing COM components but was used less often when writing native
applications. So, if one programmer wrote some ni ce code in C++ and another wrote some in
Visual Basic, there really wasn’t an easy way to work together.
Further, the world was tough for library providers, as no one choice would work in all
markets. If the writer thought the library was targeted toward the Visual Basic crowd, it’d be easy
to use from Visual Basic, but that choice might either constrain access from the C++ perspec-
tive or come with an unacceptable performance penalty. Or, a library could be written for C++
users for good performance and low-level access, but it’d ignore the Visual Basic programmers.
Sometimes a library would be written for both types of users, but this usually meant some
compromises had to happen. To send e-mail on a Windows system, for example, you have a
