Christian Nagel is author of .NET books. Christian started professional writing in the year 2000 as co-author of the book Professional C#. The first edtion of this book was released with Beta 2 of .NET 1. Since that time Christian can't stop writing and several books have been published since with Wrox Press, Addison Wesley, and APress. You find a few of his books on this page. For all books consult Amazon's author page.
Professional C# 7 and .NET Core 2.0 provides experienced programmers with the information they need to work effectively with the world’s leading programming language. The latest C# update added many new features that help you get more done in less time, and this book is your ideal guide for getting up to speed quickly. C# 7 focuses on data consumption, code simplification, and performance, with new support for local functions, tuple types, record types, pattern matching, non-nullable reference types, immutable types, and better support for variables. Improvements to Visual Studio will bring significant changes to the way C# developers interact with the space, bringing .NET to non-Microsoft platforms and incorporating tools from other platforms like Docker, Gulp, and NPM. Guided by a leading .NET expert and steeped in real-world practicality, this guide is designed to get you up to date and back to work.
With Microsoft speeding up its release cadence while offering more significant improvement with each update, it has never been more important to get a handle on new tools and features quickly. This book is designed to do just that, and more—everything you need to know about C# is right here, in the single-volume resource on every developer’s shelf.
Whether you’re entirely new to C# or just transitioning to C# 7, having a solid grasp of the latest features allows you to exploit the language’s full functionality to create robust, high -quality apps. Professional C# 7 and .NET Core 2.0 is the one-stop guide to everything you need to know.
Professional C# 6 and .NET Core 1.0 provides a complete coverage not only of the C# programming language, but all the .NET technologies needed by modern .NET developers. With .NET Core 1.0, .NET becomes open source, allows programs to run not only on Windows but also on Mac and Linux, and uses modern patterns deep in the framework.
Some say it's the bible for C# programming.
The first part of the book covers the syntax of the C# programming language including all the new features of C# 6 like the nameof expression, string interpolation, null-conditional operators, dictionary initializers, exception filters, auto property intializers, expression bodied members, and more.
With .NET Core and the Windows Runtime, foundations are covered - like the .NET Compiler Platform (Roslyn), tasks and parallel programming, synchronization, using files and streams (including the Windows Runtime streams and conversion between), networking foundations, using XML and JSON, and more.
With Windows Apps, not only the Universal Windows Platform, but also WPF is covered. WPF is still important for desktop programmers as not all users switched to Windows 10 yet. However, I've made sure the switch from WPF to UWP can be done easy. That's also why I included a separate chapter on using the MVVM pattern (Patterns with XAML Apps) where a lot of code is shared between UWP and WPF.
With the last section, Web Applications and Services, you can read about ADO.NET, Entity Framework Core, and get a great learning experience with the foundations of ASP.NET Core on the move to ASP.NET MVC 6. The ASP.NET Web API is covered as well, including important technologies such as WebHooks and SignalR. While these technologies are still based on the .NET Framework - at the time I've written the book - you continuously can get updates for the code samples on GitHub.
I've made sure the programs compile using both .NET Core and the .NET Framework, so the book is also very helpful if you are not using .NET Core and instead the .NET Framework.
As books on programming technologies are very short-lived I'm updating the code samples continuously, and add additional information at GitHub
Some links about more detailed information what's in the book:
What's in there for WPF Programmers
What's in there for ASP.NET Core Web Developers
What's in there for Universal Windows Platform App Developers
Professional C# was always a book covering technologies needed for modern .NET developers. In case you need information for technologies not covered in the actual version of the book, you can read older editions. For example, you can read about ASP.NET 4.x in Professional C# 5.0 and .NET 4.5.1. This edition also covers Windows Workflow Foundation, Peer-to-peer networking, Message Queuing, and System.Transactions. Covering Windows Forms, Syndication, .NET Programming with SQL Server, ASP.NET Dynamic Data, you need to go back to Professional C# 4.0 and .NET 4.0.
Various editions of the book have been translated to several different languages.
This book was written by 15 MVPs, I've written one of the chapters. While this book was already printed in the year 2011, and you wouldn't create new applications with Silverlight, many chapters of this book are still actual and of interest. For example, the book covers automated unit testing, the MVVM pattern, ethical hacking of ASP.NET, tips and tricks for designers and developers, driving development with user stories and BDD, and more.
The Professional C# book is not meant for the beginner. To be sucessful with Professional C#, at least you need ko know another object-oriented programming language.
This is different with Beginning Visual C#. You can be a completely beginner with programming, and the book contains simple step-by-step tutorials to guide you through.
I've been the co-author of Beginning Visual C# when the book started, but left after Beginning Visual C# 2010 as I preferred to put more effor into the Professional book, and didn't have the time to do both.
Besides covering the programming language C#, the book also covers an introduction to Windows programming, Web programming, and data access.
Today, this book is outdated as it covers .NET Framework 2.0. - so I can't recommend it for creating new .NET applications. It's shown here as this was the first book I've written completely on my own. With other books before this one I always had co-authors.
This book was great at its time covering all the features of .NET Enterprise Services - integrate COM with .NET, use DCOM, SOAP Services, and ASP.NET Web Services, manage concurrency and synchronization, activate serviced compöonents, use transactions, loosely coupled events, and more.
Pro .NET 1.1 Network Programming was orginally printed for Wrox Press while it was a British publisher. With .NET 1.1, the book received a reprint from APress.
The book hasn't been updated since .NET 1.1, but as it covers the foundation of network programming, this is still - to a large extend - the same. Networking concepts and protocols, streams, socket programming, raw sockets, IPv6, TCP, UDP, Multicast sockets, HTTP, Email-protocols - all covered in the book.