As I look around my office I quickly counted approximately 56 technical programming related books, all of which are quite current with the clear majority focused on .NET. While I won’t claim that I’ve read them all cover-to-cover (most of them I have though) I’ve read significant parts of all. The point is, I know a good technical book when I read one.

     Building Tablet PC Applications is a very good technical book. Period. If you want to design and/or build applications targeting the Microsoft Windows XP TabletPC Edition, then look no further. This book provides all the information you will need to accomplish that task and accomplish it well.

     As the name implies, this book is targeted at programmers. Certainly this is not a book for one who is just learning how to program, but assumes the reader is already familiar with how to write software and is also at least familiar with programming in .NET. This last point is significant in that one does not have to use .NET to build applications targeting the Tablet PC, but can instead use C++/COM to do so. And the book points out “you’ll be happy to know that the .NET interfaces of the Tablet PC Platform APIs are similar to the C++/COM interfaces.” So, if you are not interested in using .NET for developing Tablet PC applications, you may want to look elsewhere; then again, this book may be just fine for you. I wouldn’t know.

     I also think it would be helpful if the reader has some background knowledge of graphics programming. I have quite a bit of background in graphics programming myself (mostly vector graphics), so I can’t really be a good judge as to whether one would do fine using this book without that experience. My opinion is, however, that if you don’t have any graphics programming background, then diving into the Tablet PC platform would be a great place to start. Obviously, a good majority of the benefits surrounding the Tablet PC has a basis in the use of computer graphics and digitizing tablets.

     This book is written by two individuals who are Microsoft “insiders” who were part of Microsoft’s Tablet PC development team. That’s a real good start. The question that should remain in your mind is “But, can they convey their Tablet PC development knowledge to me in a way that I can understand it?” Good thinking on your part. I’m pleased to announce that Rob Jarrett and Philip Su, not only know the subject, but, yes, they explain it in a way that helps the reader grasp the key concepts and learn potential programming pitfalls along the way.

     The next question should be “OK, so they know the topic and they can convey the information, but are these two authors going to put me to sleep?” After all, this is a technical book. Obviously, I’m a certified geek (or I wouldn’t be writing this review, would I?). I truly like Rob and Philip’s writing style and, yes, they kept me interested throughout the book, and never bogged down in technical mumbo-jumbo forcing me to re-read a section over and over in order to get it. That happened not once.

     The book not only explains how to go about building Tablet PC Applications, it also covers the history of virtual ink enabled devices as well. The history section should not be skipped as it really helps you get excited about this technology and see the potential of where it will head in the future.

     The book includes a CD ROM with lots of fully runable applications, all in C# (another good reason for VB.NET programmers to become very comfortable with the C# language). Walking through these examples is an excellent way to learn and understand the concepts presented. It also includes an electronic version of the book (which I mostly used). With the Tablet PC, one can easily print the electronic version into Microsoft Journal (an application that comes with the Microsoft Windows XP Tablet PC Edition) where one can then make electronic notes and highlight the book using digital ink (and I did just that!). One downside of the book is that they do use quite a bit of paper reprinting the code samples that are on the CD ROM. It is much easier to follow the code in Visual Studio.NET (not that you need Visual Studio.NET to run the samples) then it is to weed through the code on paper. I would rather they have saved the paper and stuck to only pointing out code segments that are important (which they did as well).

     Overall, a very well written book and a must have for anyone who wants to learn how to go about designing and building great applications for the new Tablet PC platform.


Roy Ogborn is a leading consultant specializing in the architecture and development of Microsoft  .NET Object Oriented and n-Tier web, web service, and desktop applications using UML, Visual Basic .NET, Visual C# .NET, T-SQL, PL-SQL and Visual Studio .NET Enterprise Architect Edition. He participated in the July 2000 Microsoft Professional Developers Conference where .NET made its world debut, and he's not looked back since. Roy@Orbonyx.com, http://www.Orbonyx.com.