“This is a complete, authoritative, and truly useful reference for every .NET developer. It covers every aspect of .NET Framework library by providing concise descriptions with just the right number of examples. I would not start development of any significant .NET project without having this book on my bookshelf.”
—Max Loukianov, Vice President of Research and Development, Netpise Inc. “The .NET Framework Standard Library Annotated Reference is the one reference you really need when you use the .NET Framework library. The annotations provide clear insight into the design choices that the library development team made when building the library. Those explanations will guide you to the best design choices for your own application code.”
—Bill Wagner, Founder/Consultant, SRT Solutions, and author of Effective C# “More than just a reference, this book provides great insight into the massive amount of thought that went into designing the Microsoft .NET Framework. It is both entertaining and educational, combining interesting and sometimes amusing annotations along with the reference material.”
—Jordan Matthiesen, Software Engineer “Brad Abrams, Tamara Abrams, and the CLR team take readers on a journey through the backstreets of the .NET Framework, pointing out invaluable design decisions and performance best practices along the way. Not to be missed by any developer who has ever wondered why the Framework is designed the way it is.”
—William D. Bartholomew, Senior Software Architect, Orli-TECH Pty Ltd “This volume provides an in-depth review for every class method listed, including a CD with many examples of usage. The most valuable aspect of this book is the annotations provided; the annotators’ thoughts about the design of the .NET Framework lets the reader develop a crystal-clear understanding of what can be accomplished with this fantastic technology.”
—Bradley Snobar, Software Engineer “The utility of a reference book is often a function of how easily you can find a desired subject and, once there, how clearly is it explained. On both counts, you should find that this book stands well.”
—Dr. Wes Boudville, Inventor The .NET Framework Standard Library Annotated Reference, Volume 2, completes the definitive reference to the .NET Framework base class library. This book-and-CD set offers programmers unparalleled insight into the ECMA and ISO specifications for the classes and members, while also explaining why they were designed as they were and demonstrating how to use them. This volume covers the Networking, Reflection, and XML libraries, complementing Volume 1’s coverage of the Base Class and Extended Numerics libraries. The printed book contains high-level descriptions of each namespace, plus detailed descriptions and samples of each type, including annotations, inheritance diagrams, and a listing of members. The accompanying CD contains a vastly expanded version of the book’s text that includes detailed descriptions of each member and samples for most members—almost two thousand searchable pages of immediately useful reference material, plus a full source-code archive. With the ECMA and ISO standards as its core, the combined book and CD include

• A clear and complete overview of each namespace, describing its purpose and functionality and the inheritance hierarchy of types it defines.

• Type descriptions. Each type is covered in its own chapter, with a quick reference to the C# declaration syntax for all members defined in the type, and a detailed description of how the type is used.

• Annotations from key insiders: members of the Microsoft design team and the ECMA Standards Committee. These comments cover everything from design rationale and history to common problems and shortcomings, with exceptional clarity and candor.

• Reference tabs and an exhaustive index, which allow readers to quickly and easily navigate the text.

• Code samples. Types are illustrated by working code samples, with output included.

• Reusable source code for the more than one thousand samples is supplied as an archive on the CD. All code has been tested with versions 1.0, 1.1, and 2.0 of the .NET Framework and, where appropriate, with the .NET Compact Framework.

Amazon.com® Reader Reviews (Ranked by Helpfulness)

Average Amazon.com® Rating:  Based on 6 Ratings

WinFX, WCF, WPF, WWF. Everything runs on top of this. - 2005-09-17
Reviewer Rating:
Being a reader of Brad Abram's blog, I had found very interesting the posts, taken from SLAR vol. 1, dedicated on commenting a subset of the Framework Class Libraries (FCL).
So when he asked for volunteers on reviewing the second volume, I didn't think twice in being one of them.
In the weeks that followed I shared my time between working, studying for 70-320 and reviewing annotations and code samples.
I have to tell you: I really believe in the idea of telling us mere mortals the stories behind the scenes on developing the FCL.
Only on this two part series, you get to know why the things were done the way they are.
Since much of the book's value is in its annotations, the Annotation Index is extremely useful in finding comments made by a particular contributor.
I missed the poster that volume one had and the contributions of Jeffrey Richter, Kit George and Anders Hejlsberg. Maybe they didn't have much to comment on the libraries covered by this volume.
On the other hand, in this volume we have great contributions from Adam Nathan (COM Interop), Suzanne Cook (Fusion), Joel Pobar (Reflection, Rotor).
WinFx is coming with all those new shinny APIs such as WCF (Indigo), WPF (Avalon), WWF (Workflow), etc. But don't you forget that they are all developed on top of the libraries contained in these two books.
If you want to be a reference within your team for the years to come, these two books are among the ones to read to pursue this goal.

take a look at the internationalisation classes - 2005-09-16
Reviewer Rating:
The authors continue the exposition of Volume 1, into these classes of .NET. Here, the topics include networking, XML and reflection. The number of XML classes is less than for the others. But they give solid ability to read and write XML data. The XML functionality seems on a par with what is currently offered in Java 1.4 and 1.5.

The importance of the networking classes is because so much of our efforts revolve around the Internet these days. So you can find out how to make a request to a web server using http. Plus classes for credentialling and security. There is even a neat little IWebProxy interface, for getting to hosts using proxy servers.

Under the rubric of reflection, .NET also includes internationalisation [i18n] issues. They call it globalisation, which I think is basically the same thing. There are classes that encode culture-specific data, like calendars and languages. Microsoft has built out .NET with scads of this information. It's a global marketplace for your efforts, right? .NET lets you take advantage of this.

Like the first edition, the book goes beyond being a mere printing of man pages. Each class gets example code that may often be the simplest way to get a quick understanding of a common usage of that class. Plus the informal remarks help this understanding along.

cyberkid - 2006-06-29
Reviewer Rating:
Very well organized, excellent archives, and good source code. Thesee libraries make an excellent reference for coding your application

an authoritative and essential reference for all .NET developers - 2006-06-25
Reviewer Rating:

Excerpt from C# Online.NET Review (wiki.CSharp-Online.NET):
"This book is the authoritative reference to the .NET Framework libraries: Networking Library, Reflection Library, and XML Library. Each type has its own chapter with the following features:

- Header - namespace name, type name, library name.
- Type summary - C# declaration syntax for all members.
- Type description - detailed usage description.
- Annotations - annotations by key Microsoft design team members including Anders Hejlsberg.
- Example - C# source code and program output."

That much more than the MSDN? - 2005-09-29
Reviewer Rating:
I give the authors a lot of credit for doing a lot of work in building examples for this book. But my question is, how much better is this than the MSDN? Especially since the MSDN is built in to the environment. That being said, this is a nice piece of work and if you are a hard core .NET coder it's definitely worth a look.

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