Building Distributed Applications with Visual Basic.NET provides corporate developers with the .NET Framework techniques necessary to build distributed and reusable business systems in VB.NET. Covered topics include: VB.NET and the .NET Framework architecture and language concepts; building distributed applications with VB.NET using ADO.NET, XML, ASP.NET, SOAP, and COM+; and enterprise integration using the Services Framework.

Even though its title might suggest that this text focuses exclusively on the high-end world of distributed computing, the book manages to cover a good deal of basic VB .NET programming first. Early sections do a particularly good job of covering the new object-oriented features of the new VB (which will mean ramping up for experienced programmers), with good material on creating business components. The focus on what's new in VB continues with good explanations of structured exception handling (compared to the older On Error standard) and new ADO.NET APIs for databases.

It may surprise you that Web services are not the only ways to do distributed computing in VB .NET. The author's tour of the new .NET Remoting (the successor to Distributed COM) shows off how to call remote components across systems. Sections on COM+/.NET interoperability show how the two component standards can coexist.

Later sections in the book concentrate on VB .NET used with ASP.NET for Web programming, with good coverage of the new Web services. After some material on exploiting the built-in features of .NET classes for file I/O, multithreading, and even cryptography, the author gives some excellent advice for building Windows system services, with good specifics on installing them, plus adding event logging and performance monitoring abilities. A quick nod to network programming is illustrated with an FTP client that shows how easy it is to get to the network in .NET. The author covers XML basics and the classes used to read, write, and transform XML in .NET. Other ways to extend the reach of .NET with Microsoft Message Queue Server (MSMQ) and Active Directory show how .NET components can take full advantage of advanced features available on the Windows platform with less hassle than with the older COM/COM+ standard.

All in all, this text does justice to the rich array of options for getting VB .NET components to play well with others, whether across the Web or on the same server. Particularly for its coverage of accessing advanced Windows platform features, this book fills a worthwhile niche for those creating higher-end software with the new VB with an appealing focus on reusable distributed objects and components. --Richard Dragan