.NET Framework Standard Library Annotated Reference, ... (ISBN 0321194454)

WinFX, WCF, WPF, WWF. Everything runs on top of this.:
Being a reader of Brad Abram's blog, I had found very interesting the posts, taken from SLAR vol. 1, dedicated on commenting a subset of the Framework Class Libraries (FCL). So when he asked for volunteers on reviewing the second volume, I didn't think twice in being one of them. In the weeks that followed I shared my time between working, studying for 70-320 and reviewing annotations and code samples. I have to tell you: I really believe in the idea of telling us mere mortals the stories behind the scenes on developing the FCL. Only on this two part series, you get to know why the things were done the way they are. Since much of the book's value is in its annotations, the Annotation Index is extremely useful in finding comments made by a particular contributor. I missed the poster that volume one had and the contributions of Jeffrey Richter, Kit George and Anders Hejlsberg. Maybe they didn't have much to comment on the libraries covered by this volume. On the other hand, in this volume we have great contributions from Adam Nathan (COM Interop), Suzanne Cook (Fusion), Joel Pobar (Reflection, Rotor). WinFx is coming with all those new shinny APIs such as WCF (Indigo), WPF (Avalon), WWF (Workflow), etc. But don't you forget that they are all developed on top of the libraries contained in these two books. If you want to be a reference within your team for the years to come, these two books are among the ones to read to pursue this goal.

take a look at the internationalisation classes:
The authors continue the exposition of Volume 1, into these classes of .NET. Here, the topics include networking, XML and reflection. The number of XML classes is less than for the others. But they give solid ability to read and write XML data. The XML functionality seems on a par with what is currently offered in Java 1.4 and 1.5. The importance of the networking classes is because so much of our efforts revolve around the Internet these days. So you can find out how to make a request to a web server using http. Plus classes for credentialling and security. There is even a neat little IWebProxy interface, for getting to hosts using proxy servers. Under the rubric of reflection, .NET also includes internationalisation (i18n) issues. They call it globalisation, which I think is basically the same thing. There are classes that encode culture-specific data, like calendars and languages. Microsoft has built out .NET with scads of this information. It's a global marketplace for your efforts, right? .NET lets you take advantage of this. Like the first edition, the book goes beyond being a mere printing of man pages. Each class gets example code that may often be the simplest way to get a quick understanding of a common usage of that class. Plus the informal remarks help this understanding along.

cyberkid:
Very well organized, excellent archives, and good source code. Thesee libraries make an excellent reference for coding your application

an authoritative and essential reference for all .NET developers:
Excerpt from C# Online.NET Review (wiki.CSharp-Online.NET): "This book is the authoritative reference to the .NET Framework libraries: Networking Library, Reflection Library, and XML Library. Each type has its own chapter with the following features: - Header - namespace name, type name, library name. - Type summary - C# declaration syntax for all members. - Type description - detailed usage description. - Annotations - annotations by key Microsoft design team members including Anders Hejlsberg. - Example - C# source code and program output."

That much more than the MSDN?:
I give the authors a lot of credit for doing a lot of work in building examples for this book. But my question is, how much better is this than the MSDN? Especially since the MSDN is built in to the environment. That being said, this is a nice piece of work and if you are a hard core .NET coder it's definitely worth a look.