Exam 70-536 - Framework Fundamentals

The book I’m reading to prepare myself is Microsoft .NET Framework 2.0 Application Development Foundation.

I just finished the first chapter, Framework Fundamentals. Topics dealt with in this chapter are:

Developing applications that use system types and collections

• Manage data in a .NET Framework application by using the .NET Framework 2.0 system types.

  • Value types
  • Reference types
  • Attributes
  • Generic types
  • Exception classes
  • Boxing and Unboxing
  • TypeForwardedToAttribute class

• Implement .NET Framework interfaces to cause components to comply with standard contracts.

  • IComparable interface
  • IDisposable interface
  • IConvertible interface
  • ICloneable interface
  • IEquatable interface
  • IFormattable interface

• Control interactions between .NET Framework application components by using events and delegates.

  • Delegate class
  • EventArgs class
  • EventHandler delegates

The start is quite basic but interesting: it explains the difference between value types and reference types, with some information on nullable types and the StringBuilder class.

There are also some examples about boxing and unboxing, something which you had to think about a lot more in .NET 1.0/1.1 when we didn’t have generics yet.

It also covers a more obscure feature of the framework, the TypeForwardedToAttribute class, which lets you redesign your libraries without recompiling the code that uses them.

A nice cosmetic feature is implementing the IFormattable interface to let consumers of your class choose between display formats when calling ToString().

Another thing I got a better understanding of thanks to this chapter is operator overloading. For example, to properly implement the IEquatable interface, you would probably overload the == and != operators as well.

I finally managed to document a version of IDisposable which I like and understand.

To finish up, I’ll never have any problems remembering how to wire up an event anymore with the EventHandler delegates.

Time for the next chapter now :)