Developing .NET Enterprise Applications - John Kanalakis

Well I've already had a bunch of requests to borrow Nilges' book on writing your own .NET language and I've reluctantly agreed to lend it out.  Not because I'm some tightwad with my books, but well, because of my girlfriend.  I've moved back to SC recently and went over to her house for a visit.  “Wow, all of my books developed some migratory impulse and they all left my place and made it here?”  I thought because it would have taken her 3 weeks to bring all of them up here.  Then I head over to work with her one day.  You know it's a bad sign when people you are meeting for the first time are thanking you for lending them a book.  “Uhhh, sure dude - I, uhhh, forget, which one was it?”  “Oh, those Michael Hernandez books and the one on T-Sql and the one on SQL Server Performance Tuning and ....”  So I started to think - if I write anything good about a book, Kim will want to borrow it and I'll never see it again except vicariously through one of her co-workers who tells me how great it is.  But if I put it in my bookshelf she'll notice it and it'll meet the same fate.  But if I lock it in  a vault I won't be able to read very much of it before I run out of oxygen and vaults aren't as cheap as they used to be...  So screw it, it's just somethign I have to live with.  Actually, I have a better idea “Hey honey, I installed a little chip in the cat, and I actually used .NET to write the instructions that go along with it.  Anwyay, if this book leaves a 1 mile perimeter of my house (I work exactly .9 mi from my place) the cat will blow up into  a 1,000 pieces.  And I've also installed similar chips in each Teddy in the city of Spartanburg so if my books get anywhere near your company or house, then it will be Teddy genocide.  God I'm getting off topic here.

Anyway, John Kanalakis' Developing .NET Enterprise Applications is another GEM.  Why?  Well, because of a lot of things but anything that discusses Biztalk, MSMQ, ADO.NET, the Compact Framework and MMIT has to be kick a33.  It's about a year or two old but it's still very timely - the only gripe I have is that I wish he'd have discussed Reporting Services instead of Crystal Reports, but that's a tiny gripe and Reporting services was still in it's infancy when he started writing this. 

Those areas above are probably my favorites of the book b/c they are my favorite areas in general but there's some great stuff on ASP.NET and crypto too.  Got a lot more to write b/c this is another kick a33 book.