Programming .NET 3.5

Preface

This book tells the story of .NET 3.5. We will not try to sell you on why .NET 3.5 is great, why it will make you more productive, why you should learn it, why your company should invest in incorporating this new technology, and so on. Microsoft has lots of folks selling .NET 3.5, and they are quite good at their jobs, so we'll leave that to them. Nor will we regurgitate the Microsoft documentation; you can get that for free on the Internet. Finally, while we hope you will return to this book often and keep it on your desk as a useful reference, our goal is not to provide a compendium, but simply to introduce you to .NET 3.5, speaking as one programmer to another.

In the early days of personal computing, the hard part was finding the information you needed, because so little was published. Today, the hard part is separating the nuggets of wheat from the mountains of chaff. There is a blizzard of information out there (books, articles, web sites, blogs, videos, podcasts, sky writing …), but the signal-to-noise ratio approaches zero (while the metaphors are beginning to pile up under your feet!). Our aim is to provide you with the key information you need, together with a context for that information: a scaffolding into which you can fit what you learn to make you more productive and to make your programs better.

It is our belief that .NET 3.5 in general, and Silverlight in particular, will change programming more significantly than anything that has come from Microsoft for ...