This hands-on, example-rich guide to .NET has two goals: to help students gain an in-depth understanding of .NET's architecture, and to help them understand .NET's services to start building enterprise-class applications as rapidly as possible. Pradeep Tapadiya begins by establishing a solid foundation for enterprise .NET programming. He reviews Microsoft's short and long-term goals for .NET, illuminates .NET's programming model and infrastructure, and walks through the entire process of building a .NET application, from development through deployment and maintenance. Next, he presents in-depth coverage of .NET's support for distributed computing and Web services; and its approach to interoperability with COM and non-COM-based legacy applications. Detailed chapters address concurrency and multithreading; new .NET server and client security issues; transaction processing; .NET mechanisms for optimizing scalability; and the effective use of reflection and assemblies. An accompanying ftp site contains all of the book's extensive source code.