Some programming books suffer from the Three Little Bears syndrome: they're too detailed or not detailed enough, too conceptual or not conceptual enough, too much of a tutorial or not enough of a tutorial, and so on. The authors of Programming .NET 3.5 solved this problem by establishing clear goals for their book and by combining the insights of a senior program manager at Microsoft (Jesse Liberty) with those of a chief technology officer at an application development firm (Alex Horovitz).

Programming .NET 3.5 takes an integrated approach to Windows Presentation Foundation for Windows applications, Silverlight for delivery of rich internet applications across platforms and browsers, Windows Communication Foundation for web services and service-oriented architectures, Windows Workflow Foundation, CardSpace for user-negotiated identities, and ASP.NET/AJAX for rich client applications. The book's goal is to show how these elements can leverage Model-View-Controller, n-tier, and other long-celebrated architectural patterns while augmenting object-oriented programming with new declarative programming capabilities.

The book is divided into three parts: Presentation Options, Design Patterns (characterized as "an interlude") and The Business Layer.

Presentation Options provides an excellent introduction to eXtensive Application Markup Language, the declarative syntax for desktop-based presentations. This part of the book shows how to build a rich desktop application and later a real-world web-based AJAX-enhanced application using tools that move fluidly between XAML and managed code. Additional topics include an introduction to the Microsoft AJAX library and to the rich interactivity of browser-deployed Silverlight applications.

The Interlude on Design Patterns examines how .NET 3.5 promotes the use of architectural patterns that have only been celebrated with lip service until now.

The Business Layer part of the book shows how to replace ADO.NET classes with Language Integrated Query (LINQ) and defines SOA and shows how to implement SOA with Windows Communication Foundation. Most important, this part of the book presents a complete example of a WCF application and a complete workflow application, and also shows how to apply CardSpace for establishing identity.

Liberty and Horovitz should be commended for setting and then meeting the clearly spelled out goals for their book. The book is well organized and well written, and it follows the time-honored principle of moving from the simple to the complex. Assuming you've installed .NET Framework 3.5 and Visual Studio 2008, then this book just might be the very fastest way to bring yourself up to speed on Microsoft's latest.

I just finished reading Programming .NET 3.5 from O'Reilly. The book, published in August, is an overview of the latest .NET Framework revision. You'll get an introduction to the topics that have been introduced along the way that include technology from .NET 2.0, .NET 3.0, and the latest version; .NET 3.5. Also included are libraries such as ASP.NET MVC and Silverlight.

You can easily pick up this book and enjoy the introductions to technologies such as Windows Communication Foundation, Windows Workflow Foundation, Windows Presentation Foundation, ASP.NET MVC, and Silverlight. Each of these topics are presented in a way that will be familiar to .NET developers. New developers, without experience in .NET, will be able to take a lot away from this book. It certainly will do more for the developer who already has a .NET background, no matter how brief it is.

That said, if you only pick up the book for the introduction to each technology, you'll be missing the best that this book has to offer. Unlike most technology books these days, this book explains the topics within the context of best practices and real world scenarios. For example, prior versions of ASP.NET did not promote decoupled architectures. In fact, it made it difficult to achieve them. With the technology available in .NET 3.5, modeling and implementing proper architectures is encouraged and facilitated by the framework. This book will show you how that works in .NET 3.5 and introduce you to the technologies at the same time.

I highly recommend this book. It will be on my desk for easy reference for my .NET projects in the future.

The book is very useful if you are interested in working with XML. It starts step by step and get harder through the book. The book itself is designed for intermediate level or experts. I don't recommend this book for beginners in XML. Part two of the book talks about design patterns, and the third part tells the programmer how to work with databases and about the state machine. It is harder than the first and second parts and readers should be more proficient than beginner or intermediate level. The examples are really very helpful, and you can play with the code easily and understand from it lots of features.
I didn't finish the whole book but I enjoyed reading most of it. I recommend it .Net developers and intermediate programmers who have played with C# or visual basic.

This book is very different than most of the book I have purchased on .NET because it covers XAML, Windows Presentation Foundation (WPF), Silverlight, Ajax, Windows Communication Foundation (WCF), Workflow Foundation (WF), CardSpace, as well as the industry standard patterns Microsoft has incorporated in these technologies.

None of the technologies are gone into in great depth, and I thought I would be slamming them for that, but I can't because they tell us upfront they don't do that. I also can't do that because they did a great job of making this a roller coaster ride through the .NET 3.5 Framework. Meaning they point out some really cool stuff in one part of it, and then speed off to another part of it to show off the cool stuff there.

I would suggest you have somewhat of a background with .NET 3.5. You don't have to, but it helped me because I could easily place the book's topics into the proper context.

The authors do a good job introducing some of the key patterns found in the .NET Framework. It is the same as the rest of the book, they look at one cool view of the pattern and then speed off to the next one.

The code samples shown in the book are available on line, and they are well organized and very usable.

All in all I have enjoyed reading the book. I would recommend this book to anyone who has been trying to get a grip on all the different features in .NET 3.5. They will get a cool glimpse into each area.

The first half of this readable book focuses on WPF/XAML. It's not how to use tools, it's how to create Windows interfaces directly in XML. Useful if you want to build interfaces manually, or to want to understand or customize what's going one level below screen-drawing GUI generators like Visual Studio 2008. (Or if you want to create your own generator).

The second half begins with a review of common design patterns (MVC, Pub/Sub, Factory, Singleton, etc.) Then there's a chapter on LINQ, two on WCF, and a discussion of CardSpace.

The strongest aspect of the book is it's readability and the quantity and usefulness of the examples. The drawback is that the LINQ and WCF discussions seem short-changed to make room to cover all the different WPF controls. In another edition, I'd welcome a faster tour of WPF, and slower pace with more detail on LINQ/WCF. In particular, more LINQ examples, and a broader discussion the additions to C# syntax (e.g. lambda expressions, implicit typing) that make Linq both SQL-like and valid C#.

Recommended for experienced .Net developers looking for an overview with examples of the new features of .Net 3.5.

Nothing more than a competent but whirlwind tour of all the new technologies included in the 3.5 version of .Net. While the book proudly proclaims that now more than ever it should be easier for .Net developers to build N-Tier Applications, the sample applications in the book were mostly limited to the two-tier kind!! What's up with that?