Customer Reviews

The Definitive Guide to the .NET Compact Framework

5 star:		(6)
4 star:		(3)
3 star:		(0)
2 star:		(0)
1 star:		(0)

 

 

It is important to understand that this is a VB book through and through. In fact many concepts are explained assuming an understanding of eVB/VB. If that is indeed your background and you are not a C# person, then the book deserves 4 stars; but obviously if you are not, you should look elsewhere. The other thing to keep in mind, is that it only covers development for the PocketPC; in other words if you are cutting code for a custom WindowsCE, device then you will find no coverage regarding the differences of the 2 platforms.

Beginner to intermediate CF developers will benefit from a well written book, both in style and coverage (even though the book was written before both Service Packs and before the SmartPhone release). The tutorial style is not to my liking and it is annoying to read the same concepts first in theory and then re-read them for each sample at the end of the chapter. Had this been avoided the book would be rather smaller as well (instead of the 1000 pages that it is). However, that is probably individual preference rather than criticism and if you don't mind repetition it shouldn't bug you much.

The two areas that I think should have been covered (and are in books from the competition) are performance (measuring, optimising techniques, pitfalls etc) and threading. In fact, not only threading is completely ignored, but in most samples Windows.Forms.Timers are used combined with Application.DoEvents (whereas threading would have made a much more natural solution).

Apart from the aforementioned limitations, anything else you'd expect to see covered is! There is no point repeating here the table of contents that you can check out for yourselves. Unique areas (compared with the competition) covered are accessing the POOM (but the chapter is entirely based on a 3rd party product), building help systems and producing reports (again based on 3rd party products).

This book is great! i have another book on .net CF, but this book really helped me out in my project! Highly recommended for intermediate readers on .Net CF development. Easy to understand examples given too! but its in VB.Net.

I've bought this book two years ago to develop a project in [...] not for Pocket PC. I am very satisfied with the book, because you can't find a book about only Windows CE .NET and development for industry, then I decided to buy a book about Pocket PC, learn .NET Compact framework and adapt it to my industrial project. I did the right thing. I've learned the basic and advanced features of .NET compact framework and nowadays I still use this book as reference for development. This book is always on my desk.

This and the sql ce book got me through building my first pda application. Wish it had "gotchas" like the 32k initializecomponent code limit. Very well done. I keep this book at my side.

Well, it's no shock that this book is wonderful. Both of the authors are gifted writers and active contributors to the development community.

If you are a CF developer, you'll want to get this book ASAP. Of the current literature, much of which is good, this book is an excellent compliment. YOu don't need to have been an evB or eVC++ developer to really get a lot from it. It has a tremendously down to earth tone to, but doesn't gloss over the more complex topics. CH17 on the MessageWindow alone with worth the price of the book. It's a pretty hefty guide, loaded with examples, and you get two different perspectives from two guys who both know their art and know how to communicate it. The examples that they use will defintely inspire you to implement many of them in your own apps. I can think of at least 6 topics that they cover in depth, and supply code for, that I see questions about in the newsgroups every day.

I liked this book so much that I left my original copy at my girlfriends house (who lives out of town) and couldn't wait, so I bought another copy---and I still got the information for a fraction of what's its done for me.

Great reference for Windows mobile programming and well structured. Lots of examples give a very good starting point to write own applications.

Previous programming experience looks like being necessary to become operative faster. This is not a general introduction to Visual Basic!

It really does have everything you need to create some very sophisticated mobile apps. Of the four books I bought to learn this stuff, it's the only one I keep with me at all times.

I just want to say that I've purchased several other .NET CF books (including the Core Reference from Microsoft), and this is by far the best book I've found. It's loaded with great code and examples... all of which is useful to real-world problems. I have very little experience with programming for the Pocket PC, but this book has helped me make several programs now. Highly Recommended.

A great help from start to finish means that if you are just starting with the Compact Framework (CF), this book leads you through the elementary of creating and deploying your first app on the hand-held computer, which could be no other than a souped-up version of Hello World.

But if you are already experienced with the CF, this book offers help in many areas. I found the chapter on the Pocket Outlook Object Model especially helpful, as I am developing an app which needs to interface with the components of Outlook.

Dan has been a real help to another of our develpers in helping us with some software to interface with the voice recorder. So, obviously he knows not only the CF but those components of the hand-held which have to be accessed through unmanaged code.

If you need to develop for the hand-held, using the Compact Framework, this is a must have book.