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Book Description

Based on the principles of cognitive science and instructional design, Fluent Visual Basic, part of the Fluent Learning series, is a true tutorial that will help you build effective working models for understanding a large and complex subject: developing .NET Framework applications in Visual Basic.

Most introductory books just talk at you and give you “exercises” that have more to do with taking dictation than actually learning. Fluent Visual Basic is different. It guides you through learning the way your mind likes to learn: by solving puzzles, making connections, and building genuine understanding instead of just memorizing random facts.

Detailed information on How to…

• Write .NET applications in Visual Basic
• Leverage the incredible power of the .NET Framework Class Library
• Apply Object-Oriented principles, Design Patterns, and best practices to your code
• Develop desktop applications using the powerful Windows Presentation Foundation user interface API

Table of Contents
Part I: Getting Started
1. Application Development
2. The .NET Platform
3. The Visual Studio UI Download Now »

Book Description

Microsoft Silverlight is a powerful development platform for creating rich media applications and line of business applications for the web and desktop. Silverlight enables you to create, customize and design rich enterprise dashboards that highlight Key Performance Indicators for your business.

Microsoft Silverlight 5: Building Rich Enterprise Dashboards is a concise and practical tutorial that shows you how to create, customize and design rich enterprise dashboards with Silverlight.

This book provides real world user experience design topics and starts by providing an overview of the Silverlight Platform and the clear advantages it provides for building dashboards. The book then dives into topics such as Silverlight design and development tools, building a basic Dashboard, Dashboard types and user needs, Designing for Insight, Styling, Building an End to End Dashboard Solution and Data Access Strategies amongst others.

What you will learn from this book

• Learn how to create custom user controls, reference resources, and edit basic control templates
• Build an end-to-end dashboard solution
• Learn how to use Microsoft Expression Blend to style a dashboard
• Explore the different types of dashboards, and learn how to choose the most appropriate dashboard type based on your project goals Download Now »

Book Description

Generics were added as part of .NET Framework 2.0 in November 2005. Although similar to generics in Java, .NET generics do not apply type erasure but every object has unique representation at run-time. There is no performance hit from runtime casts and boxing conversions, which are normally expensive..NET offers type-safe versions of every classical data structure and some hybrid ones.

This book will show you everything you need to start writing type-safe applications using generic data structures available in Generics API. You will also see how you can use several collections for each task you perform. This book is full of practical examples, interesting applications, and comparisons between Generics and more traditional approaches. Finally, each container is bench marked on the basis of performance for a given task, so you know which one to use and when.

This book first covers the fundamental concepts such as type safety, Generic Methods, and Generic Containers. As the book progresses, you will learn how to join several generic containers to achieve your goals and query them efficiently using Linq. There are short exercises in every chapter to boost your knowledge.

The book also teaches you some best practices, and several patterns that are commonly available in generic code.

Some important generic algorithm definitions are present in Power Collection (an API created by Wintellect Inc.) that are missing from .NET framework. Download Now »

Book Description

Microsoft BizTalk Server 2010 Unleashed is the 100% new, 100% practical developer’s guide to Microsoft’s most powerful version of BizTalk Server. Written by an expert team of Microsoft insiders and BizTalk MVPs, it reflects unsurpassed experience with all phases of BizTalk enterprise solutions development, from planning through deployment and administration.

The authors begin by introducing BizTalk Server’s architecture and key integration concepts. Next, they offer in-depth coverage of BizTalk’s foundational features, including schemas, maps, orchestrations, and pipelines. You’ll learn how to effectively utilize both standard and custom adapters; monitor integration services; leverage cloud computing via Windows Azure; implement operational BI solutions; and make the most of business rules and BizTalk’s Business Rules Engine (BRE).

The authors offer best practices and “in the trenches” tips for everything from managing deployments through implementing state-of-the-art mobile RFID solutions. No other book offers this much useful, pragmatic, and tested knowledge for successful BizTalk development.

Brian Loesgen is a Principal Architect Evangelist on Microsoft’s Azure ISV team. A six-time Microsoft MVP, he has extensive experience in building advanced enterprise, ESB, and SOA solutions. He has coauthored eight books, including SOA with .NET and Windows Azure. Charles Young, a principal consultant at Solidsoft, and Jan Eliasen, an IT architect at Logica, have each been honored repeatedly as BizTalk MVPs, and are highly respected bloggers in the BizTalk community. Download Now »

Book Description

Using agile methods and the tools of Visual Studio 2010, development teams can deliver higher-value software faster, systematically eliminate waste, and increase transparency throughout the entire development lifecycle. Now, Microsoft Visual Studio product owner Sam Guckenheimer and leading Visual Studio implementation consultant Neno Loje show how to make the most of Microsoft’s new Visual Studio 2010 Application Lifecycle Management (ALM) tools in your environment.

This book is the definitive guide to the application of agile development with Scrum and modern software engineering practices using Visual Studio 2010. You’ll learn how to use Visual Studio 2010 to empower and engage multidisciplinary, self-managing teams and provide the transparency they need to maximize productivity. Along the way, Guckenheimer and Loje help you overcome every major impediment that leads to stakeholder dissatisfaction—from mismatched schedules to poor quality, blocked builds to irreproducible bugs, and technology “silos” to geographic “silos.”

Coverage includes

• Accelerating the “flow of value” to customers in any software project, no matter how large or complex
• Empowering high-performance software teams and removing overhead in software delivery
• Automating “burndowns” and using dashboards to gain a real-time, multidimensional view of quality and progress Download Now »

Book Description

This Wrox Blox is a value-packed resource to help experienced .NET developers learn the new .NET release. It is excerpted from the Wrox books: Professional C# 4 and .NET 4, Professional ASP.NET 4, and WPF Programmer’s Reference by Christian Nagel, Bill Evjen, Scott Hanselman, and Rod Stephens, and includes more than 100 print book pages drawn from these three key titles. It is an excellent resource to help .NET developers get up to speed fast on .NET 4, C# 4.0, ASP.NET 4, and WPF, providing all the information needed to program with the important new features, including: C# Dynamic Types and Parallel Tasks; ASP.NET Ajax, Chart Controls, MVC, and Object Caching; and key WPF principles as developers move from WinForms to WPF. In addition, it provides examples built with the native Visual Studio 2010 tools that developers are comfortable with.

Table of Contents
Part I. Professional C# 4 and .NET 4

• Covariance and Contra-variance
• Tuples
• The Dynamic Type
• Code Contracts
• Tasks
• Parallel Class
• Cancellation Framework Download Now »