Namespaces keep Visual Basic .NET organized. .NET by itself is huge and the names of individual software objects frequently overlap. Add in the code that all of the .NET programmers write and you have a giant pot of names that would be chaos if there wasn't a way to organize it and keep one software object from interfering with another. The way it's done is namespaces. This article explains what they are and how to use them.

It's a fun read!

Here's another review hot on the heels of my review of Murach's latest VB.NET book (below). I thought these two books were an interesting contrast to each other.

• Patrick:
  It's full of humor and interesting things about Visual Basic.

• Murach:
  It's a structured and serious book focused on the goal of learning!

• Patrick:
  It packs an amazing amount of information into a reasonably sized book.

• Murach:
  It's sized to allow a comprehensive and thorough coverage of the subject.

• Patrick:
  It's written by a genuine VB guru and published by O'Reilly - a major technical book publisher.

• Murach:
  Murach is a highly specialized publisher of just one kind of book: books that help you learn software. Their use of salaried in-house writers give Murach the ability to publish books that are consistent and quality controlled

In fact, there are only two things that are the same:

1. They both use a single project that's developed throughout the book to illustrate the programming concepts.
2. They're both focused on VB.NET 2008.

The event you've been waiting for! Murach has published:

Ta Da! ... ASP.NET 3.5 with VB 2008

Well ... Maybe it's not quite that big an event in your life, but Murach's books are still pretty neat.

In fact, Murach's books are unique in the world of technical publishing and are perfectly suited for the targeted goal of learning and training. If you want to learn about how to build web pages with Visual Basic .NET, this book will do the job. My review covers their new ASP.NET 3.5 with VB 2008 book, including what's right and what's wrong.

(Well ... It is if you're a first class customer.)

Microsoft announced the availability of Visual Studio 2008 SP1 today (August 12). In addition to improvements in developer support, there's also a .NET Framework 3.5 SP1 that offers it's own slate of upgrades, including, "Performance increases between 20-45% for WPF-based applications – without having to change any code." (According to Microsoft.) (Why didn't they call it .NET Framework 3.6? The mind of a Microsoft marketing flake is unfathomable.)

You can read about the goodness packed into these two upgrades here. But, unless you are an MSDN subscriber (read: $$$$$) you can't download them. MSDN subscribers only, thank you so very much. A quote from the MSDN page at Microsoft:

"If you were an MSDN Subscriber, you would be able to initiate downloads of select products directly from here."

I wonder how long it will take for these to become available to the rest of us?

Dividing people into classes and delivering first class service to some and second class service to others seems to me to be a loser way to run a company. But what do I know? I graduated from Engineering.