Scope of This Book
This book covers the topics and teaches you the skills you need to design and develop component-based .NET applications. However, to make the most of .NET, it helps to know its origins and how it improves on the shortcomings of past technologies. In addition to showing you how to perform certain tasks, the book often explains the rationale behind them in terms of the principles of component-oriented programming. Armed with such insights, you can optimize your application design for maintainability, extensibility, reusability, and productivity. While the book can be read without prior knowledge of COM, I occasionally use COM as a point of reference when it helps explain why .NET operates the way it does.
In this book, you’ll learn not only about .NET component programming and the related system issues, but also about relevant design options, tips, best practices, and pitfalls. The book avoids many implementation details of .NET and largely confines its coverage to the possibilities and the practical aspects of using .NET as a component technology: how to apply the technology and how to choose among the available design and programming models. In addition, the book contains many useful utilities, tools, and helper classes I’ve developed since .NET was introduced five years ago. These are aimed at increasing your productivity and the quality of your .NET components. After reading this book, you will be able to start developing .NET components immediately, taking full ...