Chris,

I haven't seen all of Whil's comments, but I generally know where he stands in respect to Microsoft and their products. I'll agree that a couple of years ago the good .NET books were hard to find. I won't go so far as to say an "unmitigated disaster" though. The problem with a lot of the early books was that they were written when .NET was still in beta ... things inevitably changed before .NET was released in early 2002 and consequently a lot of code samples in those books just flat out did not work. Also, a lot of the books were written without benefit of the VS IDE, so they'd tell you to do stuff like compile your .cs or .vb files from the command line in a Command Window. I won't say the books were worthless, but it's definitely harder to learn when you don't have code samples to play with and little idea of how to use the IDE.

I haven't bought any recent books, so I can't comment on whether or not they've gotten better or not, but I would think that they would have *had* to. <g>

>But are things looking rosey, as far as you can see, or is there cause for concern?

If things didn't look good for .NET, we certainly would *not* have thrown everything into this technology. Come on and jump in ... the water's fine. <g>

~~Bonnie



>Hi,
>
>Maybe this has been asked before, but I'm just starting to look into .NET and I'm wondering what reactions people have to remarks made by Whil Hentzen (publisher of books on FoxPro etc.) on his website, specifically that books on .NET "have been an unmitigated disaster for everyone who has
>invested in them" and "Microsoft has admitted that their hopes for .NET
>haven't been realized." Admittedly, I find this hard to reconcile with what I see on the web, and obviously people here are working with .NET. But are things looking rosey, as far as you can see, or is there cause for concern? It would be interesting to hear your opinions. Thanks!