This is a new book written by Alberto Población I had a chance to read, and I want to say a few words about it. I think it cover the art of programming by a very practical point of view: you can find here some tricks to solve everyday troubles that other books simply forgot to talk about. There is a chapter on data access, explaining the common pitfalls and relative solutions, to make code faster, but even for having the application appearing faster ( ie, more reactive ) to the user. An entire chapter is about new features of Windows 7: what about the new taskbar? what’s in the new shell ? What can we do in C# with the new operating system features ? And then… a lot more in GDI+ graphics, since we don’t always need to buy a control library for customizing a control, as well as for creating a simple report. Chapter 4 talks about serialization, but explaining some advanced features that really can save our time, especially when we need to parse thirty party xml files.Chapter 5 is about reflection, but again it cover some usages in the usual annoying deploy troubles. Chapter 5 is a remainder for tips and tricks we really don’t need everyday, but that sometimes appear as very hard nuts to crack, for example, did you never experience problems in reading files with some exotic encoding? Last chapter is a recipe book about WinForm that we should read in order to know how to  achieve some special effect as non rectangular form, as well as some tips on task dialogs in Windows 7. 

So in conclusion, a very interesting and original book who real world programmer and consultant using .NET should have in the tool belt. Unfortunately nothing is said about pure Web Programming as well as WPF or WCF and networking: but many concept applies even for these frameworks since we are talking at a very low level approach.

Book has a code we can download online from here. Check out the book from Amazon.