I have to admit, this book contains an impressive overview of all the Windows DNA technologies. As a reminder, DNA has been there for years and was working under NT4. It has been revamped with trumpets with a new name, .Net, with all those new services. The authors do have this in mind and they will tell you where .Net will be improving features.

I would recommend this book to anybody that wants to know what is Windows DNA/.Net (beside thinking it's everything that Microsoft is providing for developers!). Of course, you cannot have all those technologies into one book and expect the best coverage on all of them. Having that in mind, the authors create an incredible reference for developers that wants to upgrade to a more scalable & distributed environment as well as to take leverage of the new technologies that came with Windows 2000 (for developers that is).

The only thing that I have to mention (and I did to Wrox) was that I personnaly believe that this book, though the readers needs to have professional knowledge of development, would be better inside the Beginning series since this book serves as an overview reference of all those technologies. Wrox will undoubtfully then release multiple Professional books that will go further in those new technologies (such as doing COM+ events or asynchronous components, having XML Business Objects, etc.).

As a bottom line, most of the authors wrote in a confident programming style and it is a very interesting book to go through. ... But I can't wait for the .Net one!

This book comes in handy as a great reference for utilizing these technologies in the real world. If you're looking for a book that you can sit down and read cover to cover to understand the basics, this is not it. If you're an experienced developer who wants to dive into the guts of the technologies, then this is for you.

I recommend this book a chapter at a time (after reading the first 2 review chapters), in order to learn how to implement a technology (like MTS, MSMQ, etc) in the real world.

Windows DNA is an platform and methodology for Enterprise development. It is taking all of what Microsoft offers for industry : server software (SQL Server, Biztalk), development software (Visual Studio) and productivity software (Office, Viso) and making them tightly inter operatable to produce scaleable solutions that can be development very rapidly.

This book covers Microsoft DNA and does so very well. If you have been following the evolution of Microsoft's Enterprise development methodology and related technologies (MTS, COM, etc..) then you should flip though this one before buying to make sure it offers enough new information for your investment. Do this especially if you already have the Wrox title: Professional MTS/MSMQ and you have a good book on ASP or Visual Basic.

If however you are a beginner/intermediate level Visual Basic, ASP or VC++ developer and you want to expand you knowledge from how to build small-to mid-sized client-server or desktop applications to building scalable Enterprise solutions then this book is for you.