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Windows Developer Power Tools
With the wealth of tools available to software developers it can sometimes be quite a mission to find the right tool for the job at hand. Of course, the publishers of such tools will always claim that their tool is the best but this is a somewhat biased opinion. Enter "Windows Developer Power Tools".

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Professional Visual Studio 2005
The average VB.NET developers' book starts with the language and uses the IDE to help along the way. This book takes a different approach. It starts with the IDE and radiates out from there. (IDE-centric I think they call it in the publisher's blurb). It's an interesting approach, but does it work?

Ged Mead decided to find out.
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Book Review: Murach's Visual Basic 2005
Murach have been producing technical books for more than 20 years and have developed their own special style and a quite substantial, loyal readership . Their latest offering is "Murach's Visual Basic 2005".
Ged Mead offers an overview of this book. 
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ASP.NET 2.0 Instant Results
ASP.NET 2.0 Instant Results from Wrox presents you with 12 projects that demonstrate different areas of the ASP.NET 2.0 framework.
David Jeavons reviews this book.

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Write Great Code – Volume 2: Thinking low-level, writing high-level by Randall Hyde
Every programmer concerned with application performance of the code they write needs to have a good profiler at hand. This must be used to profile your applications regularly to know what part of your code is negatively affecting performance. A paradox in programming is that often, poor performance is caused by bad application design and not bad code, but you cannot verify the application design until you have written some code. However, some good designs are hampered by bad code and a profiler can only point out the bottlenecks, it cannot change your code and/or design.
Bad code must be dealt with before a single line of code is written (so to speak). This is achieved by acquiring some good coding habits and arming yourself with knowledge of the internal workings of a CPU, how your particular compiler works and how your high level code is optimized and translated to low-level machine code. This is where this book, and series thereof, comes in.
No Starch Press presents a great book that answers a lot of the fundamental questions of life, like "what is an array?" and "where do strings come from?"

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Book Review: Mastering Visual Basic 2005
Sybex have published two versions of this book: "Mastering Visual Basic 2005" by Evangelos Petroutsos and "Mastering Visual Basic 2005 Express Edition" by Evangelos Petroutsos and Acey J. Bunch.
Ged Mead takes a look at what they offer .
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ASP.NET 2.0 Website Programming
If you want to get up to speed with the majority of the new features offered by ASP.NET 2.0 then this is definitely one of the books that should be sitting on your bookshelf.
This book is aimed at those developers who already have a working knowledge of ASP.NET 1.x but does not require the developer to have knowledge of ASP.NET 2.0. The main goal of the book is to introduce the new features of ASP.NET 2.0, but unlike a standard reference book that will simply discuss each new control and all of its properties and methods the author has taken a different approach and has instead decided to introduce these new controls by building a fully functional website for a fictitious Pub. The website is called "TheBeerHouse" and incorporates such features as Newsletters, Opinion Polls, Forums and even an E-Commerce section among many other cool features. The website for this book can be viewed here.

The full title of this book is "ASP.NET 2.0 Website Programming, Problem - Design - Solution" and each chapter is laid out in three parts. The first part outlines the problem that will be overcome in the chapter, the second part discusses the design that will be implemented to overcome the problem and the third part implements the code discussed in the design section. I found that this format works really well, especially if you are relatively new to website programming as the author takes you through every detail that he himself faced when designing the website. So, rather than simply saying which design he will implement, he discusses all of the possible designs that he may have implemented and goes through the pros and cons of each one before then detailing the reasons for choosing a particular design. This actually gives you a good understanding of the different options that you have available to you for various problems and the reasons why you may choose one over the other based on the scenario you face at the time.
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Review: The Book of Visual Basic 2005
Matthew MacDonald is a well-known and respected technical book author. I already own and regularly use several of his previous .NET books, so when this one came out I was particularly interested to see if it came up to his usual high standard.
Overall, I was impressed with the detail and clarity of this book which was firmly targeted at Classic VB developers who are ready to move on to .NET now that the promised improvements in VB2005 are finally here.
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Book Review: Visual Web Developer 2005 Express Edition For Dummies
"Visual Web Developer 2005 Expression Edition For Dummies" by Alan Simpson is a recent publication in this ever-popular, long running series of books.
Although not the usual 600+ page coder's book, don't be too quick to write this one off as of no use, advises DevCity reviewer Ged Mead. It may be more useful than you think.

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Book Review- "Visual Basic 2005 Express: Now Playing"
If you are a complete newcomer to programming, you should seriously consider getting a copy of this book. It never loses sight of the fact that beginners don’t always “get it” first time, every time and it uses non-technical explanations and good learning reinforcement techniques to show you the skills in the easiest, least complicated way possible.
In the Preface to the book, author Wallace Wang sets out his philosophy:
“This book is dedicated to everyone who didn’t have the “right” education, test scores or job skills, but wound up succeeding at their chosen goal anyway. If you want to learn or do anything in your life, such as learn to program a computer, go ahead and do it and don’t let anyone ever tell you otherwise.”

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Book Review: ASP.NET 2.0 Website Programming
Marco Bellinaso's latest book takes an approach that is unlike many other ASP.NET books. Instead of showing fragmented examples for individual pages or features, the example in this book is an integrated end-to-end site (written in C#). The entire book and site has been written specifically for ASP.NET 2.0, to use the ASP.NET 2.0 features wherever they make sense.
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Murach's ASP.Net Upgrader's Guide - Review
I recently received my copy of Visual Studio 2005. I have been waiting for months to put the new features to the test. To assist me in that process I chose Murach's ASP.Net Upgrader's Guide. I chose Murach's book due to my success with their other books. I prefer C# so I have chosen the C# edition.

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ADO.NET in a Nutshell
If it wasn't enough that .NET was built on a totally new platform, Microsoft went and changed ADO to be totally new also. The new version of ADO called ADO.NET, is functionally very different from the old version. It is totally disconnected and built around object oriented coding concepts giving programmers a very powerful data access platform. Because of the many changes, I would like to suggest a good book - ADO.NET in a Nutshell - to help you get started with ADO.NET. Read more ...
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Shared Source CLI Essentials
The SSCLI is HUGE with thousands of files and over three million lines of code. Imagine jumping into that without a map! Read review on the book that is the "map" for the SSCLI.
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Object Oriented Programming in Visual Basic.NET
As most of you know now that Visual Basic.NET is very different from Visual Basic 6, some help in bridging the gap between the two would be very useful. Visual Basic.Net offers a full range of object oriented programming (OOP) techniques that VB 6 doesn't even come close to. The book Object Oriented Programming in Visual Basic.NET by J.P. Hamilton tries to cover this large learning curve in VB.NET.
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.NET Framework Essentials
The .NET platform adds many new features that programmers can take advantage of. As with any tool, the better it is understood, the more powerful it is. So how do you learn about something that is very different from conventional programming? Enter .NET Framework Essentials Second Edition. This books gives a very good overview of all major areas of the framework and shows the differences in the three main Microsoft languages that can target it, Visual Basic, C# and managed C++. Be sure to check out the entire review!
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