Customer Reviews

Programming .NET Compact Framework 3.5 (2nd Edition)

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

 

 

Reading this book after reading books like PHP 3rd Edition by Larry Ullman and Flash HOT (Hands on Training) I came in expecting more. I'm a fan of Win32 myself and the author showed his true colors a lot as well with many comments about it and shortcomings of .NET. I'm all for that and if he is that big of a fan he should make a good Win Mobile Win32 book since not much exist (Direct Show with the Camera would be a good chapter too since .NET CE's Camera Dialog is worthless and rendering pictures as a bitmap takes up a lot of memory). I bought this book to learn the latest 3.5 .Net though and didn't feel I gained much more than what I figured out on my own in the last couple years. There are many differences in .Net CE that need explained and the examples just assumed that since we knew Full .Net that he can just tell us the function name and we know everything about it. There are interesting sidebars and explanations of Win32 which make up for some but not all shortcomings. I've read certain chapters of this off and on over the last few months and ended up turning to the internet. It was missing a lot of common topics that are needed for the Mobile world too. In contrast I read the PHP and Flash books in less than a week cover to cover enjoying every minute and leaving each chapter feeling I've learned more than the internet or the users claiming to know all could ever give. I wish this would have been the same, but after finishing this the book will probably be on Ebay...

Programmers working in advanced Microsoft programming will find this has been completely revised and updated for .NET Compact Framework 2.0 and 3.5, Visual Studio 2008, and Windows Mobile SmartPhones, and shows how to create effective applications for all these handheld wireless devices. From blending mobile data with remote databases to integrating data-driven applications, it's a fine recommendation for any advanced computer reference library.

good information for the CF 2.0 to 3.5 covering most of the important changes, with some good depth on differences between the Full and Compact versions.
Skipped the database sections, as I don't tend to ever use any db's so I can't tell you if those chapters were good or not.