Customer Reviews

.NET Compact Framework Programming with Visual Basic .NET

5 star:		(1)
4 star:		(1)
3 star:		(1)
2 star:		(0)
1 star:		(2)

 

 

At first glance I thought the book was well written. However after digging deeper I found that each time I wanted a particular question asked I had to result to other books. Throughout the book the examples are fragmented and are not tied together very well.

When I downloaded the examples from the author's web site I found that every single example project I tested to be incomplete with missing files or code.

There are several syntax errors in the VB code and it is obvious that they were just copied over from the C# examples with out testing. This is also probably why the VB projects did not work. It is this reason that I decided to return the book.

I'm really impressed. I'm not usually much on the big tome books. This one is almost 1400 pages, which weighs in at 5 pounds on my bathroom scale. That being said, the text is really tight, the illustrations are cropped, not overwhelming in number, and are used effectively. And the book on the whole does not pander to the reader. The topics are also covered at a reasonable depth.

The book is essentially three books, one on the compact framework, one on WinForms and one on database access, all in one book, in a well integrated form. And it works. If you need a book that is an end-to-end introduction to .NET on small devices, this is a great book to try.

This book started well, with a good high-level overview of the CF. However, the authors then put the reader in deep water, they don't explain examples hardly at all, use very technical language without explanation and to top it all most examples didn't work, even when downloaded from the author's site. When used as a reference, there are not clear examples of how to do even simple things, instead there are very long and complex examples which confuse and overwhelm. Unless you want to spend hours trying to do simple tasks, stay well away from this book.

This is the first book I buy on compact .net. Granted, I can't compare with others.

Still, there are things I miss. First and foremost, Amazon's description says the book covers "Custom controls with Windows Forms Designer support". This isn't correct. The book just says "in can't be done in VB due to a bug in .NET, so the following examples must be in C#".

Also, there's no talk on locking your application so it's impossible to get out of it (for example when your app is the only application supposed to be used in a device - imagine the device that the UPS guys use).

Regarding what IS on the book, it's well explained and (more or less) through... but everything is on MSDN or just google. No special material here.

The right book, at the right time!

I wish I had bought this book 1 week earlier, it would have saved a lot of time and frustration.