Programming .NET Components

I guess this blog is kind of late, indeed I've been meaning to write about it ever since I got my copy of Programming .NET Components, 2nd Edition by Juval Löwy some weeks ago. Let me tell you that Juval has a deep understanding of the .NET Framework, he's also an accomplished teacher and this shows in his writing: detailed yet readable. One pearl: it's easy to say you never have to (actually you can't) destroy an object instance, you just loose all references to it and wait until the garbage collector does its thing, the truth of course is darker and more convoluted, you have to understand things like finalizers, IDispose, the Dispose pattern, the GC passes, etc. Fear not, in Section 4.5 Deterministic Finalization, Juval masterly explains the why's and how's of a bullet-proof object dispose implementation (by the way, do yourself a favor and read the whole Chapter 4. Life Cycle Management). This book will especially appeal to people creating a business layer but have information valuable for programmers working in any other layer. I think that it will be especially illuminating for Java experts trying to understand the inner guts (as they very much like doing) of .NET Framework. Highly recommended.