I had a review copy of Jose Luis Latorre Millas's Microsoft .NET Framework 4.5 Quickstart Cookbook. This book was given to me by Packt Publishing few months ago but didn't got a chance during that time to give an insight about the book. While i am very much eager to sit down and read them, I was not able to do it right away because of the projects that I've been working on. It's been very busy and will always be.

Thankfully, I did find some time few days ago to finally give this a read and publishing my thoughts on the book. WHEW!

The book is about 207 pages (9 chapters) overall and generally covers the exciting new features in .NET 4.5 framework. Chapter 1 covers building Windows Store Apps and how to improve your application to make it compliant with the Win8 lifecycle model. Chapter 2 talks about the top new features of CLR by providing code examples with detailed explanations about each example. Understanding async and await is the most interesting stuff that I’ve read about in this chapter. Chapter 3 covers the new Networking Capabilities using HttpClient and the new System.Net.Http namespaces. Chapter 4 talks about new features introduced in Entity Framework 5.0 by creating application using Code-First approach and also covers the use of Code-First migration. Chapter 5 highlights the new features of ASP.NET such as configuring our app to use unobtrusive validation, using smart tasks in HTML editor, using Web Accessibility Initiative-Accessible Rich Internet Applications (WAI-ARIA) support, extract to User Control and Page Inspector feature. Having these new great features surely become an even better framework for web development. Chapter 6 and 7 highlights the new features and capabilities of WPF. I haven't really gone through this chapter because that doesn't interest me at the moment but all I can say is that the new features listed are very promising. Chapter 8 covers ASP.NET Web API such as creating, implementing CRUD operations and setting up a self-hosted ASP.NET web API. And finally, Chapter 9 covers the new capabilities of Workflow Foundation (WF).

Overall I had fun reading the book. I learned a lot of techniques and the new cool features in .NET. The code examples with the detailed explanation are well presented. Great job on that!

If you're a mid-senior level .NET developer who would like to learn about the new features in .NET 4.5 then I'd recommend you to grab a copy of this book.