Used price: $41.59
Buy one from zShops for: $40.00
It's the book for Compact framework programming.
Don't forget to get the AskDotNet sample from GotDotNet.com, very good project too.
This book is good for .NET developers who want to port their application to .NET Compact Framework, and also must-have for eMbedded Visual Tools developers who want to migrate from eVB, eVC, VBCE, VCCE. Although this book is full of C# codes, there are samples for VB.NET as well.
There are many important topics included in this book, such as Data Accessing(ADO.Net & SQLCE), XML & XML Web Services, Multi-threading, Interoperating with Native Code, Custom Controls for .NET Compact Framework, and more than that.
If you want to learn more about .NET Compact Framework programming, or you are familiar with eMbedded Visual Tools, this could be your text book or survival guide.
After surveying books talk about .NET Compact Framework, this is what I can say, "NEVER MISS THIS"!
List price: $18.95 (that's 30% off!)
Overall, it's a good book, but after reading so many positive reviews, I was expecting something else...
Used price: $4.98
Collectible price: $4.95
Used price: $1.75
Collectible price: $2.28
Used price: $12.00
Collectible price: $15.88
Buy one from zShops for: $16.80
List price: $14.00 (that's 20% off!)
You will find introductions to the classes of the .NET framework that exist on both desktop and CF. These are very good descriptions and even though there are deeper explanations in other books, here you have the confidence that everything described is applicable without having to check elsewhere for supported classes/methods. If you are very familiar with the desktop version you will be able to skim through a good half of the material in the book just noting the differences.
There are areas which are new to the CF or just very different from the desktop and these are covered well, including deployment, infrared comms and SqlServerCe. The winform controls have fewer methods than their desktop counterparts and as such you will have to create custom controls fairly often so the chapter on this subject is very valuable and well written. You will also have to interoperate with native code and the chapter on that is good including an excellent description of the CF-specific MessageWindow component.
Two areas are briefly touched upon and deserve much more attention: Targeting both the desktop and compact frameworks from the same projects and COM interoperability. I would have also liked a chapter on performance considerations since, naturally, speed and memory are of particular interest to anybody developing on small devices; a search on the cf newsgroup emphasizes this point.
The book ends with a useful appendix listing the framework namespaces and classes with a short description accompanying the ones that are supported on the CF. I am not including a list of the contents here but it is worth going through them to get a fuller picture. They are very accurate as you'd expect from a book that is well written with few if any grammatical/syntactical mistakes (although a couple of harmless factual errors crept in).
The .NETcf is in RTM and available through VS 2003 (public release expected end of April 03). It is no surprise that this is the only book on it available now which is why I could have given it 5 stars... However there are no groundbreaking ideas in the book and most info is available on the web...