With C# Cookbook, 2nd Edition, you'll be able to learn and improve your mastery of both the C# language and the .NET platform. This updated bestseller has been completely revised to account for C# 2.0, the latest version of this popular object-oriented programming language. It also includes more than 100 new code solutions (over 300 overall) to common problems and tasks that you're sure to face as a C# programmer.

Nearly every solution, or "recipe," contains a complete, documented code sample showing you how to solve the specific problem, as well as a detailed discussion of how and why the underling technology works. This question-solution-discussion format is a proven teaching method, as any fan of O'Reilly's "Cookbook" series can attest to. In fact, no other source offers a learn-as-you-go format quite like this.

C# Cookbook, 2nd Edition is organized into 20 chapters, each of which focuses on a particular topic in creating C# solutions. Here's just a taste of what's covered:

Numeric data types

Strings and characters

Classes and structures

Generics

Exception handling

Delegates, events, and anonymous methods

Filesystem interactions

Web site access

XML usage (including XPath and XSLT)

Networking

Threading

Unsafe code

Best of all, you don't have to be an experienced C# or .NET developer to use C# Cookbook, 2nd Edition. You just have to be someone who wants to solve a problem now, without having to learn all the related theory first.

Welcome to Mastering C# .NET Database Programming! As you might already know, .NET is poised to become the hot platform for the next wave of technology deployment. .NET's strength is that it is built from the ground up to be used in a distributed environment-in other words, an environment that consists of computers and devices connected via a network. Note The focus of this book is how you write C# programs that interact with a database. C# uses ADO.NET to interact with a database; ADO.NET is the successor to ADO. In this book, you'll learn the details of interacting with a SQL Server database. SQL Server is Microsoft's premier database software. Microsoft has pledged its commitment and resources to making .NET a pervasive component of life in our technological society-ignore .NET at your own peril. The bottom line is you need to learn .NET if you want to remain competitive in today's-and tomorrow's-marketplace. In a nutshell, .NET is a completely new framework for writing many types of applications. The applications you can write using .NET include Windows applications and Web-based applications. You can use .NET to develop systems composed of interconnected services that communicate with each other over the Internet. In addition, you can use .NET to create applications that run on devices such as handheld computers and cellular phones. Although other languages allow you to develop such applications, .NET was designed with the interconnected network in mind.

This book addresses the fundamental units of Windows and .NET programming - threads. A strong understanding of the role threads play in program execution, how multiple threads can interact in order to make efficient programs, and the pitfalls to beware of when developing multithreaded applications, are all core to a developer's ability to develop effective C# programs. This book will cover how .NET applications are executed, the life cycle of a thread in .NET, how the .NET Framework uses threads, how threads work in an event-driven environment, how we can avoid race conditions and deadlocks, how the activity of multiple threads can be synchronized, and how to debug multithreaded applications. We finish it off by describing the creation of a multithreaded network application.

What is great about this book?

Threads are fundamental to the way GUI and server applications operate; if your code is running in a GUI, then you're already writing code in a threaded environment. An ASP.NET page also runs in a threaded environment. This book aims to cover the tricky issues of threading in .NET, and particularly to do so from the perspective of C# developers. Threading is by nature not easy to grasp, but a necessary step towards mastery of programming for the .NET platform.