.NET has undergone three major revisions in a few years, making it a little difficult for the average programmer to keep up with the changes and their implications. The author’s purpose is to report on some of the problems he faces in his everyday work as a .NET programmer and on the solutions he has developed and the insights he has gained.

The contents are a miscellany of essays on the following major topics: test-driven development (TDD), .NET and C#, and design patterns. The essays are organized into four chapters. The first chapter is a short introduction to TDD. The second reports on struct versus class types, generic types and methods, delegates, overriding the GetHashCode method, versioning, and loading and unloading assemblies at runtime. The third chapter reports on overriding the ToString method and manipulating strings in a multicultural setting. The last chapter reports on creating iterators, implementing interfaces, overloading methods, working with nullable and immutable types, using inheritance effectively, and implementing a few classical design patterns.

The author’s style of writing is clear, and he usually gets to the point quite straightforwardly, which I appreciate. However, the book falls short if you are looking for a cookbook or a textbook, since the collection of essays is incomplete, inconsistent, and, in some cases, unorthodox. For example, there is not a word on major technologies and sources of trouble, such as Windows Forms, ADO.NET, ASP.NET, and concurrency; it seems that the author is planning on writing new books in this series, but no information on the topics to be covered is available. With regard to the inconsistencies, I thought that the purpose of the first chapter would be to introduce the reader to the general TDD philosophy, and that it would be used extensively throughout the book; unfortunately, it was used sparingly and for trivial tests in the remaining chapters. In some cases, the use of design patterns is a little unorthodox, or, at least, a little confusing for designers who are very familiar with the Gang of Four library of patterns [1]. For instance, the author mentions that the purpose of the visitor pattern is “to enable an external object to view a class’s internal state without accessing the internal state,” which seems more related to the memento pattern; the idea behind the well-known strategy pattern is implemented with delegates, which are called functors by the author, but no reference to this pattern is made.

Summing up, I think that the essays in this book are appealing if they are read separately, but the readers who are interested in them will definitely need to consult other books. I recommend Newkirk and Vorontsov’s book [2] for readers interested in using .NET and TDD, Wagner’s book [3] for readers who need to delve into the intricacies of C# 1.0 and .NET 1.1, and Metsker’s book [4] for readers interested in implementing design patterns in C#.