Richard Grimes has gone deep into the heart of .NET development and lived to tell the tale — in Developing Applications with Visual Studio .NET. This legendary Windows developer mastered .NET the hard way: by writing hundreds of test applications, stepping through them with debuggers, and poring over pseudo assembly language code with the Intermediate Language Disassembler. He never takes the official documentation's word for it — which is super helpful where no documentation exists!

Writing for experienced C++ Win32 developers, Grimes begins with an in-depth introduction to the .NET runtime — including the role of assemblies and metadata. Next, he introduces .NET's crucial Framework Class Library, which is in some ways profoundly different from the Win32 API, in other ways deeply familiar (some parts are merely wrappers over Win32; maybe Microsoft didn't have time to reconceive them).

You'll find in-depth coverage of contexts, remoting, COM/COM+ interoperation, and (when you're ready to appreciate it) the Visual Studio.NET environment. There's a full chapter on Visual C++.NET, which Grimes considers the most flexible .NET language; start-to-finish coverage of creating, constructing, and deploying solutions; and detailed debugging coverage (for managed and unmanaged code). Simply an outstanding resource. (Bill Camarda)

Bill Camarda is a consultant, writer, and web/multimedia content developer with nearly 20 years' experience in helping technology companies deploy and market advanced software, computing, and networking products and services. He served for nearly ten years as vice president of a New Jersey–based marketing company, where he supervised a wide range of graphics and web design projects. His 15 books include Special Edition Using Word 2000 and Upgrading & Fixing Networks For Dummies®, Second Edition.