While many books cover specific technical issues, they very rarely provide architectural guidance, which is especially helpful with adoption of Microsoft .NET. This title educates developers on just these topics. The expert authors—two members of the Microsoft Visual Basic .NET product team—present technologies within the context of their most appropriate use, and discuss design tradeoffs for large-scale applications. They also offer advanced techniques for performance tuning, testing, and implementation. Architectural Guidance - Delivers the advanced guidance about architecture and tradeoffs that veteran developers need, especially since .NET allows developers to choose and use far more tools and technologies Applied focus - Discusses advanced technologies and real-world consequences of design decisions in conjunction with pervasive issues such as application performance, scalability, and security Expert Authors - Written by two Microsoft Visual Basic team members who are uniquely qualified to show how best to use Visual Basic .NET in developing enterprise applications

Table of Contents:
Introduction xv PART I MOVING TO ENTERPRISE DEVELOPMENT WITH VISUAL BASIC .NET 1 Enterprise Application Development and Visual Basic .NET 3 Enterprise Application Development 3 Team Development 4 Performance, Scalability, and Reliability 4 Implementation Technologies and Integration 5 The Distributed Environment 6 The Development Process 6 Collecting Requirements 7 Design and Architecture 8 Implementation 11 Testing 11 Deployment 12 Visual Basic .NET 12 Visual Basic Then and Now 12 Good Coding Practices 15 Conclusion 18 2 Visual Basic .NET for the Enterprise 19 Moving Beyond Visual Basic 6.0 21 Option Strict Is Not Optional 21 Short-Circuiting Your Operators 26 Calling Platform Functions Directly: Declare and DllImport 29 Types in Visual Basic .NET 32 Type Magic: Boxing and Unboxing 33 Classes and Modules 34 Structures 35 Interfaces 37 Enumeration Types 38 Delegates and Events 41 Visual Basic and OOP 45 Making the Most of Namespaces 45 Inheritance: The Wily Beast of OOP 49 Singletons 61 Exception Handling Redux 63 Exception Handling Basics 63 Throwing Exceptions 65 Exception Handling No-Nos 66 Custom Exceptions 67 Resource Management and IDisposable 69 The Garbage Collector 69 The IDisposable Interface 70 Conclusion 72 3 Multithreaded Programming 73 An Overview of Basic Threading Concepts 74 Processes and Threads 74 Creating Threads 76 Encapsulating Threads 78 Wrapping a Thread with a Class 78 Controlling Thread Execution 81 The ThreadState Property and the Life Cycle of a Thread 81 Referencing the Current Thread 85 Thread Control Methods 85 Tying It All Together 91 Thread Synchronization 92 Race Conditions and You 92 Synchronization Constructs 93 Thread Pooling 102 The ThreadPool Class 104 Conclusion 105 4 Playing Nice with Others: Native Code and COM Interoperability 107 The PInvoke Service 109 Calling Native Methods 110 Marshaling Types 118 Implementing Callback Functions 134 Wrapping Things Up 137 COM and Visual Basic .NET 137 What Is COM Interop? 137 COM vs. .NET 138 What COM Interop Does 140 Using COM from Visual Basic .NET 140 Using Visual Basic .NET from COM 144 COM Threading Models 147 Performance Considerations 147 Memory Considerations 148 Conclusion 149 PART II BUILDING AN ENTERPRISE INFRASTRUCTURE 5 Distributed Programming in .NET 153 Serialization 154 Serialization Formats 154 The Serializable Attribute 157 XML Web Services 161 Getting Started 162 SOAP Header Extensions 163 Performance 166 Limitations of Web Services 168 Security 168 Remoting 170 Getting Started 171 Picking the Right Channel 173 Marshaling Data 174 Using a Separate Interface 175 Remoting Singletons 176 Security 177 Tying It All Together 178 Conclusion 183 6 Custom Network Communication 185 An Overview of Network Communication 186 Network Architectures 186 Communications Protocols 188 The WebRequest Class: More Than Meets the Eye 192 Supporting Client Authentication 194 Managing Your Connections 194 Creating Custom WebRequestModules 196 Advanced WebRequest Features 198 The WebClient Class 203 Socket Programming 206 Getting Started with Addressing 206 Using the TcpClient, TcpListener, and UdpClient Classes 208 Down to the Wire: Socket-Level Network Programming 212 Conclusion 218 7 Windows Services 219 Introduction to Windows Services 220 The ServiceController Class 222 The Service Manager Application 225 The Windows Event Log 228 A Simple Service 230 A Timely Example of a Service 233 Communicating with the Service 234 Updating the Date and Time 238 Installing a Service 244 Debugging a Service 247 Debugging the OnStart Method 248 The Trace Class 249 Conclusion 250 8 Integrating Enterprise-Level Services 251 Understanding COM+ and Enterprise Services 251 COM+ Requirements 253 Creating a Serviced Component 253 Understanding Application Activation 256 Understanding COM+ Contexts 258 COM+ Object Construction 260 Object Pooling 262 Just-in-Time Activation 269 COM+ Transactions 272 Messaging 280 Messages 281 Message Queues 281 Messaging in Visual Basic .NET 283 Creating Your First Queue 284 Working with Your Queue 286 Automating Queue Installation 294 Conclusion 295 9 Adding Security to Your Applications 297 Security Features in .NET 298 Role-Based Security 298 Web Application Security 299 Evidence-Based Security 299 Cryptography 301 Buffer Overrun Detection 305 Enterprise Security Scenarios 305 Code Security 305 User Identity 310 Scripting Security 311 Authentication and Authorization 313 Conclusion 320 PART III PERFORMANCE AND DEBUGGING 10 Essential Debugging Techniques 323 Debuggers 323 The Visual Studio .NET Debugger 324 Other Debuggers 325 Better Debugging with the .NET Diagnostic Tools 330 The Debugger Class 330 Event Logs 331 The Trace and Debug Classes 341 Conclusion 350 11 Common Performance Issues 351 String Concatenation 352 StringBuilder Makes the Grade 353 Format Strings 354 String Performance by the Numbers 356 Late Binding 358 Designing Types 360 Error Handling 364 On Error Goto and On Error Resume Next vs. Exceptions 364 Exception Handling Best Practices 366 Database Issues 366 Database Connection Leaks and Connection Pooling 366 Using a DataReader with a Stored Proc Whenever Possible 370 Using Ordinals Instead of Column Names 371 Resource Management and IDisposable 373 ASP.NET 374 ASP.NET Session State 374 STA COM Interop in ASP.NET 374 Loading the Right Runtime 377 Conclusion 382 12 The Art of Performance Tuning 383 Performance Testing 383 Tools of the Trade 384 Performance Test Planning 391 Performance Tuning 393 The Sanity Check 394 Attaching a Debugger 397 Low-Level Analysis 397 Conclusion 398 A Using Visual Basic .NET in a Multideveloper Environment 399 Architecture and Design Issues 399 Analyzing Business Requirements 400 Defining the Technical Architecture for a Project 400 Visual Studio .NET Enterprise Architect 401 Making the Most of Visual Studio .NET 401 Modeling Tools 401 Enterprise Templates 402 Visual SourceSafe and Source Control 406 Managing Web Projects 409 Managing Dependencies 410 Customizing the Start Page 412 B Getting Started with Application Center Test 415 An Overview of ACT 416 Using the Standalone Version of ACT 417 Useful Techniques for Customizing ACT Tests 421 Inserting Random Delay into Your Tests 421 Extracting ASP.NET ViewState from the Response Object 422 Appending ASP.NET ViewState to a Request 422 The ACT Test Object Model 423 C Common Language Runtime Performance Counters 427 .NET Performance Counters 429 .NET CLR Data 429 .NET CLR Exceptions 429 .NET CLR Interop 431 .NET CLR JIT 431 .NET CLR Loading 432 .NET CLR LocksAndThreads 434 .NET CLR Memory 436 .NET CLR Networking 442 .NET CLR Remoting 442 .NET CLR Security 444 Performance Counters for ASP.NET 445 ASP.NET Applications 447 D Performance Counter Quick Reference 453 Common Performance Counters 453 Application-Specific Counters 454 ASP.NET and Web Services 455 SQL Database Applications 456 Applications That Use Interop or Remoting 457 INDEX