Cross-Platform .NET Development: Using Mono, Portable .NET, and Microsoft .NET Review

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Cross-Platform .NET Development: Using Mono, Portable .NET, and Microsoft .NET ReviewMicrosoft and cross-platform?! Sounds like an oxymoron. Yet the book shows how .NET has given rise to this. The key step was Microsoft transferring the specifications of C# and .NET's CLI to ECMA and ISO. This lets third parties write compilers that produce IL bytecode and thence to assembly in a given hardware.
So you could write C# code on some platform, like linux. Then with Mono or Portable.NET, produce x86 binaries.
The authors describe the open source Mono and Portable, and compare these with Microsoft's own .NET offerings. They show that Mono and Portable are quite functional. For example, using Portable, you can write in Java, C#, C or VB.NET and compile.
The book goes into some moderate level of detail about CLI. But if you are a programmer in C# or C, say, and you just want to get native binaries, without wanting to know about CLI, the book is still useful. You can safely skip the CLI sections, without losing the gist of what you need to know. For many of us, whatever language we use, we don't need or want knowledge of a specific assembly language.Cross-Platform .NET Development: Using Mono, Portable .NET, and Microsoft .NET OverviewTaking a radical departure from past practices, Microsoft successfully lobbied ECMA to turn its C# and .NET software specifications into an ECMA standard, thereby allowing others to create and release compilers, software, and runtimes for the .NET environment. Since the release of the standard, several projects have undertaken the development of open source .NET capable of running on Wintel and non-Wintel platforms, such as Linux, Unix, and Mac OS X. The best known of these projects are Mono (from Novell, formerly Ximian), and Portable.NET from Southern Storm and the GNU Project. But can all of these implementations of .NET interoperate? Can you take a Windows .NET application and run it on Linux? The answer is yes, if you understand the issues. Cross-Platform .NET Development is the first book to examine the advantages and issues of building portable, cross-platform .NET code. Using this book, a programmer that's even a little familiar with .NET can learn how to run the same .NET code on Linux, Unix, Mac OS X, and Windows, using Mono (on Linux), Portable.NET (on Mac OS X) and .NET on Windows. Filled with example code and wisdom - do's, dont's, pitfalls, gotchas, and insights from two experienced .NET developers - Cross-Platform .NET Development shows why .NET isn't just for Windows anymore.

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CIL Programming: Under the Hood of .NET Review

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CIL Programming: Under the Hood of .NET ReviewHas this ever happened to you... There's this new technology or programming language that you're dying to learn, but there are no books. Finally, someone writes a book, you get the book from the bookseller (Amazon), you open the book, and you thumb through the pages. Well, that's the way I felt about learning Microsoft IL for .NET. I really was keen about learning .NET's "assembly language" because throughout my career I found that having low level knowledge about how a system is put together is very, very useful. Now, I'm not suggesting that you stop everything you're doing and run out to learn CIL programming. However, I believe that if you want to be a serious .NET professional, learning CIL should definitely be on your To-Do list.
So what about Bock's Book: "CIL Programming: Under the Hood of .NET"? In a word - disappointing. Bock spends most of the book's first chapter entitled "Language Interoperability" on detailed discussion of programs written in a variety of languages. He's trying to make the point that the CLR allows programs written in different languages to freely interoperate. Duh? Why spend the better part of the book's opening talking about everything but CIL. There's even an Oberon (?) programming sample here.
The second and third chapters on ILASM Directives, and, CIL Opcodes, respectively, read like my weekend shopping lists. While it is true that programming books have to regurgitate all the nasty details of the programming language, the good books tell its readers how to internalize the information and describe useful ways of summarizing the information in one's mind. That is, the authors of the better books have figured out some rhyme and reason to the language and they share these insights with their readers. On the other hand, this is what I found in these two most important chapters of Bock's book: the more I read, the more questions I had. I wound up spending significant time on the NET trying to resolve questions that were raised in the material in these two chapters. Clearly, the author did not anticipate these questions.
The fourth chapter, "ILASM and CIL in Practice" is a decent discussion of a typical sample program in IL. It demonstrates some of the IL constructs and programming concerns discussed in the previous chapters.
Chapter 6 is interesting. Here the author talks about and contrasts the IL generated by various programming languages. Some of the VB.NET and C# exposés were eye-opening, but then Bock goes back to Oberon again.
The author ends off the book in chapters 7 and 8 with some very long and tedious samples. I got nothing from this. Chapter 9, the last in the book, is a two-pager on "CIL Tips".
So why do I give this book 3 stars?
1) The book includes Chapter 5, a well-written and interesting discussion about CIL Debugging.
2) Right now, Bock's book is one of three books that talk about CIL. It is the only book that is targeted directly at programming. Although John Gough's "Compiling for the .NET Common Language Runtime" is an excellent book, it is very specialized and targets would-be compiler authors. I didn't read the third book in the IL arena, Serge Lidin's "Inside Microsoft .NET IL Assembler", but I did thumb through it several times (you know what little that is worth): this book strikes me as being very difficult.
RECOMMENDATIONS:
If you need to learn IL Programming right now, buy Bock's book - read the second half of chapter 1, and read Chapters 2-5, maybe Chapter 6. If you have the time, money, and inclination, then buy and read Gough's book. You'll need a lot of time for Gough, but you will definitely learn.
If learning IL is not that pressing right now, I would wait to see if someone else releases a better book.CIL Programming: Under the Hood of .NET OverviewFor the most part, .NET developers use a high-level language, such as C# or VB .NET, to develop their systems. However, the core language of .NET is the Common Intermediate Language, or CIL. This language is the language of .NETdevelopers can use CIL to do whatever is allowed by the .NET specifications, which is not the case for C# and VB .NET. Although it is unlikely that the majority of .NET developers will create their assemblies in CIL, understanding how CIL works will give them a deep, language-independent insight into the core parts of .NET. Furthermore, such knowledge is essential for creating dynamic types, a powerful part of the .NET Framework.In CIL Programming: Under the Hood of .NET, Jason Bock covers the essentials of programming the CIL. First, Bock discusses the basics of what .NET assemblies are and how manifests fit into the picture. He then shows how to create assemblies in .NETincluding the ilasm directives and CIL opcodes, and how these are used to define assemblies, classes, field, methods, and method definitions. Bock also covers how C# and VB .NET and other non-MS languages emit CIL and how they differ. Finally, he reveals how developers can create dynamic assemblies at runtime via the Emitter classes.After reading CIL Programming: Under the Hood of .NET, developers will have a better understanding of the CIL and how to program directly into it. A must-have on every .NET developers desk!Jason Bock is consultant and instructor for Intertech-Inc. (a company devoted to delivering hands-on workshops for enterprise web developers and whose focus is the professional Java, XML, and .NET enterprise developer).He has worked on a number of business applications using a diverse set of substrates and languages such as C#, .NET, and Java. He is the author of ".NET Security" by Apress, and "Visual Basic 6 Win32 API Tutorial, and has written numerous articles on technical development issues associated with both VB and Java.Jason holds a B.A. and a Masters degree in Electrical Engineering from Marquette University.You can find out more about him at http://www.jasonbock.net

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Framework Design Guidelines: Conventions, Idioms, and Patterns for Reusable .NET Libraries Review

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Framework Design Guidelines: Conventions, Idioms, and Patterns for Reusable .NET Libraries ReviewDepending on your experience with the .NET framework, you may consider the contents of this book as everything from invaluable insights to mildly amusing explanations of a few details of .NET you've always wondered about.
Krzysztof Cwalina and Brad Abrams have worked with designing the public API of the .NET framework from its beginning, and during that process they have compiled a comprehensive guideline for framework design. It is basically this internal guideline they are now publishing as a book.
The text is easy to read and makes for a good reference book. It is littered with more free-form comments from lots of other experts such as Jeffrey Richter, Christopher Brumme, and the occasional comment from Anders Hejlsberg. However, it is mostly reminiscent of a Word document with lots of revision comments liberally sprinkled all over, and I suspect this is how book was made: Take an internal guideline document and polish it off; pass it around to a lot of collegues in Microsoft and ask them to comment on it; incorporate most comments verbatim in the text; and publish.
That said, I still found myself using lots of the little insights in the book in my work in the weeks after having read it. Most of those insights actually came from the free-form comments, so I'm not complaining.
If you use FxCop and are familiar with many of the rules in this tool, most of the guidelines in this book will come as no surprise to you. FxCop was originally a project of Krzysztof's and Brad's designed to automate much of their code review work, so you can learn most of the contents of this book just by using FxCop.
As such, almost all the guidelines in the book are publicly known material, but it's still a well organized reference, and the little extra comments from the authors and lots of other people are what made this book a worthwhile read for me.
I wouldn't consider this book essential reading for .NET developers, but it basically supplements FxCop pretty well.Framework Design Guidelines: Conventions, Idioms, and Patterns for Reusable .NET Libraries OverviewA new edition of this title is available, ISBN-10: 0321545613 ISBN-13: 9780321545619"This book is an absolute must-read for all .NET developers. It gives clear do and don't guidance on how to design class libraries for .NET. It also offers insight into the design and creation of .NET that really helps developers understand the reasons why things are the way they are. This information will aid developers designing their own class libraries and will also allow them to take advantage of the .NET class library more effectively."--Jeffrey Richter, author/trainer/consultant, Wintellect"Framework Design Guidelines will help you in two important ways. First, any .NET developer will benefit from a greater understanding of the design principles that govern the .NET Base Class Library. Second, a deeper understanding of these principles will help you to create software that integrates well with the .NET environment. Quite frankly, this book should be on every .NET developer's bookshelf." --Bill Wagner, founder and consultant, SRT Solutions, author of Effective C#"Not since Brooks' The Mythical Man Month has the major software maker of its time produced a book so full of relevant advice for the modern software developer. This book has a permanent place on my bookshelf and I consult it frequently."--George Byrkit, senior software engineer, Genomic Solutions"This book is a must-read for all architects and software developers thinking about frameworks. The book offers insight into some driving factors behind the design of the .NET Framework. It should be considered mandatory reading for anybody tasked with creating application frameworks."--Peter Winkler, senior software engineer, Balance Technology Inc."Frameworks are valuable but notoriously difficult to construct: Your every decision must be geared towards making them easy to be used correctly and difficult to be used incorrectly. This book takes you through a progression of recommendations that will eliminate many of those downstream 'I wish I'd known that earlier' moments. I wish I'd read it earlier."--Paul Besly, principal technologist, QA"Filled with information useful to developers and architects of all levels, this book provides practical guidelines and expert background information to get behind the rules. Framework Design Guidelines takes the already published guidelines to a higher level, and it is needed to write applications that integrate well in the .NET area."--Cristof Falk, software engineerFramework Design Guidelines: Conventions, Idioms, and Patterns for Reusable .NET Libraries teaches developers the best practices for designing system frameworks and reusable libraries for use with the Microsoft .NET Framework and WinFX. This book focuses on the design issues that directly affect the programmability of a framework, specifically its publicly accessible APIs. This book can improve the work of any .NET developer producing code that other developers will use. An added benefit is a collection of annotations to the guidelines by various members of the Microsoft .NET Framework and WinFX teams, which provide a lively discussion of the motives behind the guidelines, along with examples of good reasons for breaking the guidelines.Microsoft architects Krzysztof Cwalina and Brad Abrams offer guidelines for framework design from the top down. From their long experience and deep insight, you will learnThe general philosophy of framework design Principles and guidelines that are fundamental to overall framework design Naming guidelines for the various parts of a framework, such as namespaces, types, and members Guidelines for the design of types and members of types Issues and guidelines that are important to ensure appropriate extensibilityin your framework Guidelines for working with exceptions, the preferred error reporting mechanism in the .NET Framework and WinFX Guidelines for extending and using types that commonly appear in frameworks Guidelines for and examples of common framework design patternsGuidelines in this book come in four major forms: Do, Consider, Avoid, and Do not. In general, a Do guideline should almost always be followed, a Consider guideline should generally be followed, an Avoid guideline indicates that something is generally not a good idea, and a Do not guideline indicates something you should almost never do. Every guideline includes a discussion of its applicability, and most guidelines include a code example.A companion DVD includes the Designing .NET Class Libraries video series, instructional presentations by the authors on design guidelines for developing classes and components that extend the .NET Framework. A sample API specification and other useful resources are also included.

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