Developing Microsoft .NET Controls with Microsoft Visual Basic .NET

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Summary: Learn nooks and crannys of the .Net Framework
Review: If you think you know the framework, I suggest you take a look at Mr. Connell's book. He covers many undercovered areas in great detail. Isolated storage and encryption come to mind. In short, if you are looking for new material, I highly recommend this book. Its on a par with Mr. Connell's .Net Coding Techniques.

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Summary: The outstanding, and the ugly
Review: This book is unusual in that, in addition to providing you with the information you actually bought the book for, you get lots of information about some pretty obscure .Net topics. Even better (assuming you're an experienced VB Developer), he doesn't waste so darn much space taking up topics you're already sick of reading about (controlling program flow, what is a class, and the like). He also mentioned in passing a couple of little gems in the SDK that I was unaware of. Of course, if you're not an experienced developer, why are you buying a book on controls? (save your money!) So John Connell gets a dozen stars for content.

The ugly: the book is poorly edited. There are a number of typographical errors, grammatical word omissions, etc. There are innumerable bugs in the book's code. There are also a number of omissions in the instructions, of a type such as instructing you to add a class without mentioning which component to add the class to, things like that. You'll want to get the download code from MSPress, so you can look at his code to see where he added a module, or whatever. Because I am an experienced developer, I found that the debugging required actually improved my learning (by keeping me awake), but I'm pretty sure an inexperienced programmer would get pretty frustrated. So: no stars to MSPress for the editing and testing of code! Bad job here, you guys, and considerably worse than the job you usually do.

If you already know how to program, buy this book!

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Summary: Good Book, lacking in the ASP.NET Department
Review: This was an excellent book for VB.NET Windows Applications (all examples were for windows, but the principals and some of the code would work for the web) in using Editors, Type Converters, Designers; a lot of the advanced topics.

Talking directly about ASP.NET and mobile applications was lacking a lot, in my opinion, but overall still I thought it was a great book to teach more advanced topics useful at design time.

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Summary: The first I've heard of GUCCI verbs
Review: While I've never built a control before, I need to build something for a client. After pre-ordering this, I was amazed to find out about designer verbs and designers in general. The Wizards of Redmond constructed the pieces to interact and really make building sophisticated controls easy for anyone that understands OO and VB.Net (which is what I use). I purchased and read Connell's other books so hoped this would be in a par. "Controls" takes you from soup to nuts - and even discusses sophisticated licensing so you can build a control and sell it. If you are new to controls, even though this covers some fairly complicated technology, Mr. Connell clearly explains how its used and provides tons of full examples. Anyway, that's my 2 cents worth. Personally, I found the book extremely useful even if I didnt need it as I do. The technologies he explains such as encryption, serialization, and isolated storage alone make this a valuable tool for any serious professional programmer.