With about 10 years since its first release, Microsoft's .NET Framework 4.5 is one of the most solid development technologies for creating casual, business, or enterprise applications. It has evolved into a very stable and solid framework for developing applications, with a solid core called the CLR (Common Language Runtime). Microsoft .NET Framework 4.5 includes massive changes and enables modern application and UI development.
Microsoft .NET Framework 4.5 Quickstart Cookbook aims to give you a runthrough of the most exciting features of the latest version. You will experience all the flavors of .NET 4.5 hands on. The "How-to" recipes mix the right ingredients for a final taste of the most appetizing features and characteristics. The book is written in a way that enables you to dip in and out of the chapters.
The book is full of practical code examples that are designed to clearly exemplify the different features and their applications in real-world development. All the chapters and recipes are progressive and based on the fresh features of .NET Framework 4.5.
The book is divided into functional examples that combine many techniques to showcase the usage of a concrete .NET 4.5 feature.
Chapter 1, Windows Store Apps, shows us the basics, 101, of creating Windows Store apps and some key aspects of it, such as adding a splash screen, tiles, understanding the Windows 8 lifecycle model, and using toasts.
Chapter 2, Exploring the Top New Features of the CLR, helps us explore some of the most exciting features of the CLR, such as portable class libraries, controlling timeout on regular expressions, overriding the default reflection behavior, and understanding how to use async and await.
Chapter 3, Understanding the New Networking Capabilities, explores the new networking features and show us how to use the HttpClient and System.Net.Http namespaces.
Chapter 4, Understanding the New Features of Entity Framework 5.0, helps us explore Code First and Code First Migrations directly.
Chapter 5, Understanding the New Features of ASP.NET, helps us explore the new capabilities while creating an ASP.NET web forms application; it shows us how to use unobtrusive validation and explains what it is good for; and it focuses on the other improvements, such as smart tasks, WAI-ARIA support, and "extract to user control" between others.
Chapter 6, Implementing WPF New Features, covers the new way of handling errors in WPF asynchronously with INotifyDataErrorInfo, use the WeakEvent pattern with the WeakEventManager class, bind to static properties, Throttling data source update delays and LiveShapping, and repositioning elements in the view when its bound data gets updated.
Chapter 7, Applying the New WCF's Features, helps us explore some of the most interesting features of WCF, such as its asynchronous support, WebSockets, and Contract First development.
Chapter 8, Creating and Hosting Our First ASP.NET Web API, basically explores this amazing new feature under the ASP.NET umbrella: web API. We will be creating a basic web API, adding CRUD capabilities, and self-hosting it.
Chapter 9, Using the New Capabilities of WF, explores one of the most exciting updates for .NET 4.5; it comes, greatly polished, with a mature and greatly enhanced framework for the workflow foundation. Here we explore creating a state machine workflow and new designer capabilities.
Appendix A, Resources for Further Knowledge, provides key references to websites of interest regarding the areas covered in this book.
Appendix B, NET 4.5, Deployment Risks and Issues, will show us some issues that can happen when applying .NET 4.5 to an existing project and on its deployment, such as the limitation on platform, different behaviors of the .NET framework, and that some things that might work properly in our developer environment might not work as well when deployed.