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Rating: 
Summary: Nice ATL section.
Review: First, I am a professional Visual C++ developer and bought this book to learn the new .NET extensions. After working myself through the first two detailed chapters I am left with a lot of definitions but am wondering how or why I would use this information. Perhaps this might make a good reference book, I have no idea how accruate the informaton is, but it is not a "primer" in he sense that you buy this book as a self taught learning aid. I'm bored out of my skull.
Rating: 
Summary: Hard to Read
Review: First, I am a professional Visual C++ developer and bought this book to learn the new .NET extensions. After working myself through the first two detailed chapters I am left with a lot of definitions but am wondering how or why I would use this information. Perhaps this might make a good reference book, I have no idea how accruate the informaton is, but it is not a "primer" in he sense that you buy this book as a self taught learning aid. I'm bored out of my skull.
Rating: 
Summary: Lots of bugs and inconsistencies but some good information a
Review: In case you are considering buying this book, be aware it was "written and tested for the final release of .Net v1.0". According to authors, many features on the final release of .NET v.10 were not working properly and therefore the sample does not work. The technical revision of this book was poor and the obvious errors in the code make me wonder if the code was ever tested or if one author read the previous chapter written separately by another author. Examples to illustrate this fact can be found on page 373, 396, 423 and many others (I only start taking notes about the pages by the end of the book when I decided I needed to write a review about it). The errors, added to the limitations on the final release of the product, disturb my reading more than if no spell checker was used. Nevertheless, the book has some very good chapters and given that at the time I could not find any other book available on the subject, I read until the very last page. Hopefully now that .Net is out, the authors will do a second and carefully revised edition of the book.
Rating:
Summary: Not perfect, but has a lot of information
Review: Managed C++ is a very difficult area and there is not a lot of books in this area. Most of the books seem to concentrate on C# or VB.NET. This is sad because it seems like a lot of the current work to be done in .NET has a lot to do with taking the existing millions of lines of unmanaged code and COM code and making it work/or port to .NET. This can only be done with Managed C++. The book does not pupport to be a complete reference in this area. It states in the Introduction that "At heart, this book is pragmatic: its purpose is to tell experienced C++ programmers what they need to know about Visual C++.NET" and for the most part, I do believe that this has been accomplished.
The first chapter is quick overview on what's new in Visual C++.NET. This didn't do much for me but is a quick glance. Chapter 2 "Introduction to Managed C++" is quite good, IMHO. It takes all of the .NET concepts and shows the Managed C++ keywords to perform it. Chapter 3 on Assemblies is pretty good but does not drill down far enough. A tie to PE files is not made. I did learn quite a bit about Resources though which I did not understand before. Attributes and Reflection, Chapter 4 is excellent. These features are very important in .NET. Chapter 5 on .NET Framework utility classes, I felt was a good overview on something that could easily fill 1200 pages. I especially liked Chapters 7 and 8 "Managed and Unmanaged Code" and "COM Interoperability." I feel these are the heart of Managed C++. In Chapter 7, the authors do a fine job of presenting the differences between managed and unmanaged code and the IJW mechanism. I do feel that the example class chosen to be warpped, an integer linked list could have been better and doesn't cover all the cases. The P/Invoke discussion is quite good. The COM Interop chapter is excellent - it has good examples. All in all, I think that the authors did a fairly good job in writing about a fairly complex area.
Rating:
Summary: Nice ATL section.
Review: with one or two other .net C++ books would be perfect.
Very good explenation of unicode strings and how they relate to BSTR strings.
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