David Hayden talks about "Practical .NET2 and C#2"

David Hayden, a well known website developer and .NET blogger talks about his initial comments on Practical .NET2 and C#2!

Reading Practical .NET 2 and C#2 by Patrick Smacchia
Kudos to Patrick Smacchia on his new book, Practical .NET 2 and C#2.

I have read about 150 pages of the 800+ page book and the book rocks. The chapters I have read so far ( yeah, I don't always read the chapters in order ):

Chapter 1: Assembly, module, IL language
Chapter 4: The CLR ( Common Language Runtime )
Chapter 5: Processes, threads, and synchronization
Chapter 7: Reflection, late binding, attributes
Chapter 12: Inheritance, polymorphism and abstraction
Chapter 13: Generics
Chapter 15: Collections

are excellent and full of detail. The pages are packed, too:

No big glaring gaps of white space and fluff that you get from some books that try to meet a page minimum.

Code samples get right to the point as opposed to showing a lot of extraneous code.
All code is in C# which means you don't have to deal with duplicate examples in multiple languages.

I will give a full review in a few weeks, but so far the book is a real joy to read. Check it out for yourself.

Source: David Hayden ( Florida .NET Developer )

Sahil Malik posted a first review of Practical .NET2 and C#2.

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If you knew C# 2.0 already, what C# 2.0 book would you buy?

Wait a minute, if you already knew C# 2.0, why the heck would you bother to buy another C# 2.0 book? Because learning C# is probably 0.05% of what you need to know. The rest of the 99.5% is the framework.

I have been recently poring through a pretty fantastic book - Practical .NET 2.0 and C# 2.0 by Patrick Smacchia. I have to admit, if you are hard pressed on time like I am, and don't have the patience to read through 5 different books to learn what you need to, then keep this book at an arms length. I really like how the chapters are laid out in logical topics, which make it so much easier to find the specific information I am looking for.

What makes this book great, is that this book is so much more than just C# 2.0, it's really about the framework (wasn't it always about the framework?).

EasyRegex update and EasyBarcode released.

I have released a minor update to EasyRegex. Turns out a little bug in my licensing code would cause some machines to report the beta license as being expired. Before installing the update, you will need to uninstall the previous version. The updated version can be downloaded from
http://www.paradoxalpress.com/Software_EasyRegex.aspx

I have also released EasyBarcode 1.0.0 today. A quick and easy little software to generate print-ready EAN/ISBN barcodes.

• Generate EAN barcodes for both ISBN and ISBN-13 numbers
• Built-in ISBN validation to ensure the numbers input are valid
• Generates barcodes which also include the ISBN information and the optional price UPC-5 supplement
• Exports barcodes to PDF files for easy inclusion in your layouts and projects

An EasyBarcode trial can be downloaded from:
http://www.paradoxalpress.com/Software_EasyBarcode.aspx

EasyRegex, the perfect tool for the avid .NET Regex developer

Download EasyRegex 1.0.0 and use it free for the beta period.

• Build libraries with your regular expressions. Take advantage of the built-in expression builder to quickly and easily put together expressions.
• Build a test matrix for your expression by adding various text sources and run your expressions against your test matrix to find problems and regressions.
• Do performance testing of your regular expressions. Test various expressions against each other and compare the performance difference between run-time regular expressions and pre-compiled expression in the .NET framework.
• Take advantage of a new feature of the 2.0 .NET framework by taking your regular expression libraries and pre-compiling them into assemblies which can be used directly in your .NET projects.

Amazon Sales Rank Watcher Version 1.1 is now out...

Managed to find some time to do some more work on my Amazon Sales Rank Watcher software. I want to thank everyone who tried the initial release and sent me some great feedback. The work on this version focused mostly on adressing bugs, implementing suggestions and solidifying the application. Here is the "what's new" for this version.

• This version fixes most of the bugs which were reported with the first version. Such as the occational exception with the display of the rank graph.
• Added a "Check for Updates" button
• Added filtering capabilities on the Amazon search to restrict the search to a specific type of product.
• Application now minimizes into the try and can display a pop-up when new ranking information is downloaded
• Improved the overall graph display.

The latest version of Amazon Sales Rank Watcher can be downloaded from the Paradoxal Press website.

"Practical .NET2 and C#2" featured on The Code Project

A new post is up on "The Code Project" in regards to "Practical .NET2 and C#2" containing general book information as well as various content extracts from the book... Check it out!
http://www.codeproject.com/books/understand_csharp_event.asp

We have recieved our copies of "Practical .NET2 and C#2" last week and all orders on ParadoxalPress.com are now shipping!

In addition, to celebrate, all books on Paradoxal Press are now on sale at 10% off Amazon's price for the month of Feburary. This means $33.99 for "Practical .NET2 and C#2" and "The COMPLETE Effect and HLSL Guide" for $23.75.

We are also offering a complete Paradoxal Press bundle which includes "Practical .NET2 and C#2", "The COMPLETE Effect and HLSL Guide" and "The COMPLETE HLSL Reference" for only $51.50, which is 50% over the retail price.

And all orders to the continental USA ship for free.

That's it for my plug ;)