visual basic

It is rare that you come across a book that helps you with so many issues as this book does. We have a large library in our company and I make regular use of many of them. I do find that when speaking of .Net and enterprise development there is not a lot of books book covering this topic. Sure there are many books that does a good job of covering some of the areas but what we wanted was a book that took us from start till finish and this book does. I read the book cover to cover and then I ordered an extra copy that subsequently has been read by our project managers and various developers. There's a wealth of information in this book and if you follow the MSF guidelines (outlined in chapter 20) for creating successful software projects and at the same time use the right tools (which the authors do a great job of explaining) then you have the odds on your side.

This must be the very first true book about enterprise development with .Net, and I love it.

Staring off with chapter 1, you really get a feel for what the book is about. Chapters 2, 3, 4 and 5 gently introduces you to msf and uml and leads up to chapter 6 in which the book takes off with some simple examples.

chapter 7 could have been placed before chapter 6, but it's okay where it is as it is about uml maintenance.

Chapters 8,9 and 10 are excellent introductions (and more than that) to enterprise project templates; some very nice writing here.

Chapters 11, 12, 13 and 14 covers most of the enterprise vs .net tools, with the vss chapter and chapter 12 being the best, and chapter 15 contains some great coverage of .net deployment.

Chapters 16 and 17 are hands on chapters and they truly build on the information presented previously in the book, excellent.

Chapters 18 and 19 are a bit poor in that they don't really introduce that much information but I guess that if you are looking for alternatives to Visio uml modelling they give you something to work with (Rational xde).

Chapter 20 is a really nice "summary" of msf 3.0 and if you are new to msf this chapter will get you op to speed in no time.

Overall this book contains so much information that it is hard to see why you would not want to read it.

Oh, and the appendix is a great way of finding information related to this book.

with so many enterprise books out there it's refreshing to see one that actually does what it says on the tin: educate/teach you how to work with various tools and methods on enterprise projects. i haven't seen any other books make visio and uml so easy to learn nor have i found other books with as detailed and yet easy to learn msf info. a truly good book