Return to Programming Book Reviews.
.NET 2.0 for Delphi Programmers
by Jon Shemitz

Publisher: Apress Buy it Now! 

ISBN: 1590593863
Format: Paperback, 544pp
CD: NO

Oh boy was I amazed to read the title of this book by Jon Shemitz: ".Net 2.0 for Delphi programmers"!

Btw, do you know what .Net is and how it relates to your existing Delphi (for Win32) knowledge?

I know BDS 2006 does not support .NET 2.0 and BDS 2006 includes the latest Delphi version (both for Win32 and .NET 1.1 development) released by Borland.
Also, I'm aware of the upcoming "Highlander" (this is the code name for the next Delphi) and that it will support .NET 2.0 features.

Now, what confuses me is the title of the book: ".NET 2.0 for Delphi programmers" - is Jon to talk about all the new language enhancements to be included in Delphi like generics, partial classes and nullable types? Will I also see some code examples of (still not available to the public) generics in Delphi?
Unfortunately, I was wrong as you will see in the detailed book review...

By browsing through the first few pages of the book, I've found the answer to my question: "This is not a Delphi book - this is a book about .NET, for Delphi programmers"!

Ok, things are more clear now. Obviously no .NET 2.0 Delphi examples :(.

Let's see why would you like to buy and read this book even though the title is somehow misleading...

.Net and the C# language from the Delphi developer perspective

The second part of the book (some 150 pages) is about "C# and Delphi". Being that C# is the language .NET is built in, it is obvious that in order to understand .NET you will need to be able to read C#. Since C# is quite similar to Delphi, you should have no problems in understanding the vast amount of examples in this chapter. Mostly all the examples in this part are written in C#. Jon tries to explain several language features and how those map to Delphi, like boxing, delegates, enumerations, operators and a like. Also, new .NET 2.0 language enhancements like generics and nullable types are brought to your attention.
No Delphi examples in this part of the book :(

We come to the third and the most important part of the book: "The Framework Class Library" (or the FCL). In short, FCL is to .NET what VCL and RTL are for Delphi.
For me, this was the most interesting part. Jon first talks about .NET strings, regular expressions, files, collections and other great .NET features. Again, most of the examples are in C#, some of them are also provided for Delphi. There are quite a few tricky situations in Delphi for .NET, like using the array class, and Jon adds a note for every such case.

Throughout the FCL part, Jon walks the reader through WinForms development, .NET threading concepts, Remoting, graphics (GDI+) and XML. Mostly all the most important .NET concepts are covered and, once more, accompanied with a lot of source code examples.

Finally, the last part of the book provides a glossary of terms, talks about using unit testing with NUnit, describes assembly loading and signing and provides an overview of working with .NET configuration files.

Source code for more then 150 sample projects is available for free on the Appress web site. Of course, I do suggest you to download the code as simply looking at it will not make it as much clear as when you hit F9 and actually run the code.

Appress also provides a sample chapter for free: Chapter 11 - Strings and Files in the FCL

To buy or not to buy?

If you are using Delhpi 3, and you have no idea what .NET is about ... well, you really do not need to buy this book.

For those Delphi developers that are loyal to Win32 developemnt, but want / have to take a peak into .NET, this book offers just the right amount of terms and .NET exampels for them to stay with current with where .NET is going.