.NET Resources and Links

Welcome to the .NET portal. Here you will find an exhaustive set of annotated links to .NET resources. If you know of something that should be listed here and isn't, or would like to suggest a new category, just drop us a note.

Featured link | Sample Chapters from Wrox Press | News

Basic information | .NET Language implementations | ASP.NET
SOAP, XML, Web servives | Assessments, competition, controversy

(For convenience, some links appear in two sections.)

Featured link
http://www.wrox.com	The home of Wrox Press - Programmer to Programmer
Sample Chapters from Wrox Press
ASP.NET Intranet Programming	Chapter 2 - The IBUYSPY Portal Architecture
ASP.NET Security	Chapter 7 - Windows Authentication
Professional .NET Network Programming	Chapter 7 - Multicast Sockets
ASP.NET 1.0 with VB.NET	Chapter 1 - System.Web
ASP.NET 1.0 with C#	Chapter 9 - System.Web.Services
Beginning VB.NET Second Edition	Chapter 7 - Building Windows Applictions
Professional C# - Second Edition	Chapter 9 - Data Access with .NET
Professional C# - Second Edition	Chapter 19 - Graphics with GDI +
ASP.NET Distributed Data Applications	Chapter 3 - Accessing XML Documents
ASP.NET Distributed Data Applications	Chapter 5 - Working With Down Level Clients
News
What's new in Beta 2	Beta 2 of .NET, made available in June, includes a number of significant differences (such as the replacement of SDL by WSDL) and additions. This page will be useful to anyone who started working with .NET from beta 1 or earlier.
ComputerWorld: Users hold back on plans for .NET	According to ComputerWorld, representatives of large companies are still skeptical of Microsoft's .NET release plans.
Visual Studio.NET beta 2 to ship at TechEd	Ignoring naysayers, Microsoft is accelerating the release schedule of .NET. The beta 2 versions of .NET and Visual Studio.NET were made available in June.
John Markoff article: Internet critic takes on Microsoft	David Winer, maintainer of the influential Davenet site, accuses Microsoft of hijacking the standards process as part of its .NET effort. (Access note: the site requires registration, which is free.) Winer now states, in rather strong terms, that Markoff misrepresented him.
Hailstorm announcement	The newest Web Services announcement.
Microsoft.NET Developer Training Tour	This intense two-day training course will equip developers with the foundation skills for building XML Web service and application with VS.NET technologies. Starting with a sample application, you will be lead step-by-step through building an entirely new intranet application accessing existing XML Web services on the Internet. The training includes 16 modules covering all areas of .NET development. RSVP Code for .NET Experts -- gh444
Basic information
The complete draft .NET standards	ECMA is standardizing key elements of the .NET offering. You will find all the current documents here as part of the .NET Experts site.
Basic Microsoft .NET page	From the source!
.NET download	The place to go if you want to download beta 1 and see for yourself.
Basic Visual Studio.NET page	The blueprint for the open-language development environment that will be the developer's primary interface to .NET.
The Mono project	An open-source implementation of .NET, based on the ECMA draft standard!
.NET overview by Leon Erlanger	A useful introduction to .NET and its competitive situation. (Yes, it's a Java Server Page.)
The significance of .NET, by Bertrand Meyer	General presentation of the technology and its meaning for the industry.
VSJ Magazine's .NET site	An impressive effort to provide serious, impartial technical information on .NET.
Dotnet user groups	A worldwide listing of current .NET user groups (temporarily unavailable)
.NET books	Not that many books yet, but expect the list to grow quickly.
More .NET resources	One of the most complete resource centers.
DevX's Guide to .NET	Another useful resource center.
.netWire's .NET news	A useful source for .NET news. Updated daily.
.NET Language implementations
APL for .NET	Press release only.
Introduction to C# on .NET	A good overview of one of the principal .NET languages.
Component Pascal for .NET	Component Pascal implementation. The language compiled is actually the same as Oberon (see entry below). This site is particularly interesting for John Gough's paper comparing his experiences retargeting the compiler to both the Java Virtual Machine and .NET, the most interesting comparison we have seen of the two virtual machine architectures.
COBOL for .NET	White papers describing Fujitsu's impressive effort to make COBOL available under .NET. Very informative.
Eiffel for .NET	ISE's site devoted to the .NET implementation of Eiffel, one of the first compilers to take advantage of the multi-language capabilities of the framework. White papers and online demos with downloadable source code.
Oberon for .NET	Oberon is the last language designed by Niklaus Wirth as a successor to Pascal and Modula-2. This page describes its evolution for .NET. See also the Component Pascal entry above.
Python for .NET	One of the first language implementations under .NET. Not much information on the Web page, but the tools is available for download.
Smalltalk for .NET	The link to .NET papers was broken the last time we checked this site, but we saw the papers earlier so they will most likely be brought back.
Visual Basic.NET: recent changes	A striking example of the difficulties of language evolution, and what the backward compatibility issues mean when you have six million users.
ASP.NET
ASP vs. JSP	For background information only: compares JSP to ASP, not ASP.NET.
SOAP, XML, Web services
The official SOAP submission to the World Wide Web Consortium	Quite clear for an official specification.
Basic Microsoft SOAP page	Microsoft's view of SOAP
Web service resource	A resource center that goes beyond .NET to cover Web service technologies from both Microsoft and its competitors: SOAP, UDDI, Sun One, HP Netaction.
SOAP Web services	"A list of all known SOAP / Web Services that are ready to be consumed by your applications".
The WSDL specification	A joint submission by Microsoft and IBM, the Web Services Description Language is intended to be the standard for describing Web services. Not the easiest document to read, but presents a crucial (although so far little hyped) component of the technology.
Assessments, competition, controversy
Picking a Winner: .NET vs. J2EE	A good independent comparison of the two major frameworks.
Sun's recent Sun One announcement	A definite flavor of also-ran. See also the original announcement.
.NET overview by Leon Erlanger	A useful introduction to .NET and its competitive situation. (Yes, it's a Java Server Page.)
Sun's Web policy	Forrester's assessment of Sun's future: definitely bright. Compare with next.
Sun's Web policy	Meta's assessment of Sun's future: definitely dark. Compare with previous.
"The truth about Sun"	All that Microsoft wants you to know about Sun.
John Markoff article: Internet critic takes on Microsoft	David Winer, maintainer of the influential Davenet site, accuses Microsoft of hijacking the standards process as part of its .NET effort. (Access note: the site requires registration, which is free.) Winer now states, in rather strong terms, that Markoff misrepresented him.
Sun's response to delegates	Of historical interest: a 1997 white paper by Sun lambasting the notion of "delegate" introduced in Microsoft's Visual J++ and used again in the .NET object model. Does a lot to explain the climate of systematic hostility to outside contributions that made something like .NET inevitable.
John Gough: Stacking them up	An excellent practical comparison of the .NET and JVM virtual machine architectures and their adequacy as target platforms for multiple languages, based on the author's experience with retargeting his Component Pascal compiler for both.
J2EE and .NET: Two Roads Diverge in XML	A brief comparison of .NET and J2EE from internetnews.com.