To make the best use of this book, please obtain the latest release of Visual Studio 2010. Any edition will do, including the free Express edition for C#, which can be downloaded from http://www.microsoft.com/express/.
For Chapter 14 you will need a copy of SQL Server or SQL Server Express. Some editions of Visual Studio will install SQL Server Express for you by default, so you may already have this.
The example source code for this book is available through the O’Reilly site at http://oreilly.com/catalog/9780596159832/.