Student's Essential Guide to .NET (eBook)

Cover 1
Contents 6
Preface 10
Acknowledgements 18
Chapter 1. An overview of .NET 20
Objective 20
The common structure 21
Welcome to the world of .NET 22
What is .NET? 24
Does the .NET Framework kill the concepts of componentware? 26
What is .NET? 27
The web services 29
The .NET Framework 31
.NET componentware 32
The .NET class library 34
My Services 34
Enterprise services and servers 35
Chapter 2. The Common Language Runtime 38
Objective 38
Introduction 38
Hardware model 39
Run-time support libraries 41
Source code portability 41
Programming language syntax 42
Programmatic access to operating system services 42
The standard run-time support package 43
The traditional software development model 43
An alternative model 44
Virtual machines 44
The unambiguous general environment 45
The design of the .NET Framework VM 47
What is programming language syntax? 50
What does programming language semantics mean? 51
Data types 53
The Common Type System 55
The CTS basic type definition 56
Value types in the CTS 56
Reference types in the CTS 58
Reference type declarations in C# 59
Converting value types to reference types 59
Using the CLR environment 61
MSIL Microsoft Intermediate Language 63
Metadata 64
Managed code organisation into assemblies 65
The assembly structure 66
How does the CLR manage execution? 67
Creating the JIT compilation 68
Chapter 3. The framework class library and other support functionality 72
Objective 72
Other topics 73
Introduction 74
What about the other subordinate namespaces? 78
Garbage collection 79
The traditional memory map for an application 79
Automatic garbage collection 82
A strategy to avoid any asynchronous object destruction problems 84
.NET process management 85
File IO services 87
Chapter 4. Supported programming languages 92
Objective 92
Introduction 93
The C# language 94
The C# data types 98
Classes 99
Interfaces 100
Structures 100
Delegates 101
Arrays 103
The C# language control structures 105
TheVB.NET language 107
The VB.NET data types 111
Classes in VB.NET 112
Interfaces in VB.NET 113
Structures in VB.NET 113
Delegates 114
Arrays 115
The VB.NET language control structures 116
Other features common to both the C# language and VB.NET 119
Namespaces 119
Structured exception handling 120
Chapter 5. Windows Forms 126
Objective 126
Introduction 127
Extract from a simple VB.NET form with a button and textbox 128
Parent–child architecture 132
Modal/non-modal 133
SDI/MDI applications 133
Window form controls 133
The examples 135
Chapter 6. NET components 170
Objective 170
Introduction 171
Setting up Visual Studio .NET 172
The examples 173
Chapter 7. Interoperability issues 206
Objective 206
Introduction 206
Win32 API interoperability 208
Using an existing system DLL 208
Exported functions from 'cards.dll' 209
Creating the user control 212
The component implementation 214
Interoperability with COM objects 219
The COM example using the Media Player 223
Other interoperability issues 226
Chapter 8. The role of XML 228
Objective 228
Introduction 229
How is this accomplished? 229
XML documents 230
Why is XML so important to us? 232
Namespaces 236
The DOM 239
Document Type Definitions 244
XML schemas 245
XML in the development world of Visual Studio .NET 247
XML serialisation 252
Benefits of XML serialisation 258
SOAP-based serialisation 259
Chapter 9. ADO.NET 262
Objective 262
Introduction 262
The multi-tiered design model 263
A background review of RDMS and SQL 264
The ADO.NET model 267
A simple example 267
Reading and writing XML Files 271
Extending the Previous Example 272
Data providers–how we link to different RDMSs 273
Datasets 275
Translating datasets to XML 277
Dataset and XML synchronisation 280
Chapter 10. Networking, web forms and ASP.NET 282
Objective 282
Introduction 282
Sockets 283
The mechanisms to establishing a simple socket connection 284
Web pages 292
Web applications and ASP.NET 298
The typical web application architecture 302
The example 303
Chapter 11.Web services 318
Objective 318
Introduction 319
Is it really that simple? 323
Linkage problems 324
Early binding 324
Late binding 325
Example 332
Self-description for web services 333
Using VS.NET to create the proxy 335
Windows client design 338
Web client design 339
Chapter 12. The case study 344
Objective 344
Introduction 345
The problem 346
Appendix A 368
Appendix B 378
Index 380