Programming .NET 3.5

How This Book Is Organized

This book will take a goal- and objective-oriented approach to the .NET 3.5 suite of framework and related technologies, and will focus implicitly on an MVC/n-tier and SOA approach to building applications. We will make best practices and pattern-based programming techniques explicit from the very beginning, without letting these architectural design patterns get in the way of straightforward explanations of the new classes and how to put them to work.

We will urge you, as developers, to stop thinking about "desktop versus web" applications and to think instead about the problem to be solved, the model or engine that represents the solution, and from there to proceed downward to persistence and upward to presentation.

A range of presentation choices is available, including Windows Forms, WPF, Silverlight, ASP.NET/AJAX, and ASP.NET. We will not demonstrate the use of Windows Forms or ASP.NET, as familiarity with these technologies is assumed; we will focus instead on WPF, AJAX, and Silverlight. This approach will enable you to extract maximum value from learning the new technologies without getting bogged down in the technologies of the past.

The book consists of 14 chapters organized into three parts.

Part I, Presentation Options

Chapter 1, .NET 3.5: A Better Framework for Building MVC, N-Tier, and SOA Applications

This chapter provides a short observation on the real power of .NET 3.5.

Chapter 2, Introducing XAML: A Declarative Way to Create Windows UIs

The single ...