Windows Developer Power Tools

Contents of This Book

We’ve laid out this book in much the same order developers follow while developing software. First we deal with writing code, then troubleshooting, and finally miscellaneous tasks. Individual chapters flesh out each of those areas.

Part I: Writing Code

Chapter 1, Building ASP.NET Applications

This chapter covers tools to help improve and speed your ASP.NET development and application performance. We cover a number of great controls and three different variants of Ajax implementations.

Chapter 2, Working with Windows Forms

.NET’s Windows.Forms namespace has many great features, but there’s room for improvement. This chapter helps you find tools and controls to style up your Windows Forms applications, easily implement docking windows, and examine how controls send and receive messages.

Chapter 3, Developing in .NET 3.0 (a.k.a. “WinFx”)

The components making up the next Framework version (.NET 3.0 or WinFx, call it what you will) are great enablers. The Windows Communication Foundation (WCF, formerly “Indigo”) is drastically changing the way developers handle communication in their systems, and the Windows Presentation Foundation (WPF, formerly “Avalon”) gives an amazing facelift to applications. This chapter covers tools that are fundamental to building great systems in WCF and WPF.

Chapter 4, Working with Code Libraries

A wealth of functionality is available in open source libraries. Here, we’ll show you libraries that let you work with PDF files, create RSS feeds, ...