The Microsoft® .NET Framework provides powerful technologies such as ASP.NET Web Forms, XML Web services, and Windows® Forms to simplify developing applications and components that work seamlessly on the Internet. This book shows how to make the most of the .NET Framework’s common language runtime (CLR). Written by two highly respected developer/writers and intended for anyone who understands OOP concepts such as data abstraction, inheritance, and polymorphism, this book clearly explains the extensible type system of the CLR, examines how the CLR manages the behavior of types, and explores how an application manipulates types. While focusing on Visual Basic® .NET, its in-depth explanations and concepts apply equally to all programming languages that target the .NET Framework.

Topics covered include:

• The .NET Framework architecture
• Building, packaging, deploying, and administering applications and their types
• Building and deploying shared assemblies
• Type fundamentals
• Primitive, reference, and value types
• Operations common to all objects
• Type members and accessibility
• Constants, fields, methods, properties, and events
• Working with text
• Enumerated types and bit flags
• Array types
• Interfaces
• Custom attributes
• Delegates
• Error handling with exceptions
• Automatic memory management
• AppDomains and reflection

Jeffrey Richter is a cofounder of Wintellect (www.wintellect.com)-a training, debugging, and consulting firm dedicated to helping companies build better software faster. He is the author of the previous editions of this book, Windows via C/C++, and several other Windows®-related programming books. Jeffrey has been consulting with the Microsoft® .NET Framework team since October 1999.