Introducing .NET 4.0 (the book that is)

Some time back Alex Mackey very kindly asked me to write a couple of paragraphs about what I was excited about in .NET 4.0 for inclusion in his book “Introducing .NET 4.0 With Visual Studio 2010”

First of all I should say I know Alex a little from DevEvening and I provided a bit of help by putting him in touch with the right people on the Visual Studio team. I also received a free copy of the book (via Eric as it happens – thanks Eric). The publisher sent me an eBook link but I still struggle finding the time to read paper books never mind electronic ones (not that they take longer to read, they’re just never to hand when I find I have a spare moment).

With that out the way (and the caveat that I haven’t read the whole thing yet, not be a long chalk) what are my first impressions?

Excellent actually. I was taken aback by the sheer breadth of material Alex has covered; from the Visual Studio IDE, languages and the CLR, parallel, WF, WCF, EF etc etc through to jQuery, Silverlight and even a chapter on Windows Azure. That’s a whole lot of material both in terms of scope and volume.

The style is quite informal and there’s a logical progression with Alex delving deeper to perhaps a code example or a practical exercise when required (and his judgement on this feels about right to me). Alex does a good job of separating the important from the merely interesting and outlining the “why” as well as the “how”. There’s even the odd joke in there that made me smile.

As I said, I’ve got a long way to go but my initial impressions are very favourable. If you’re looking for a good introduction to .NET 4.0 and all its changes, you could do a lot worse.

[That’s not an affiliate link BTW – just a link to the book at The Book Depository and I have no connection with them either :)]