ASP.NET Distributed Data Applications [Paperback]

Alex Homer (Author), Dave Sussman (Author)

Book Description

Series: Programmer to Programmer | Publication Date: April 2002

This book will inspire you with a range of ideas on how data can be used to drive Web applications, and how that data can be most effectively utilized at each level of the design. Inefficient data use leads to the sort of slow, unresponsive Web applications that nobody enjoys using. By making good use of both server and client-side code, we can solve these problems. This book will arm you with the techniques you need to build Web applications that fly.

The book is a voyage of exploration through almost all aspects of building ASP.NET applications that handle data and work across the Internet (or other HTTP networks, such as local Intranets). It takes a practical approach to building task-specific components, Web pages and Web applications based on a server running ASP.NET. The book focusses on n-tier architecture design and the way it can be coded, using SQL Server as a data source and simple Web server hardware.

The ASP.NET code in this book is presented in VB.NET, while client-side code is presented in JavaScript. A C# version of the code is also available for download from the Wrox website along with the VB.NET.

This book will cover:

* The new .NET philosophy for managing relational and XML data
* The techniques you need to make this philosophy work in the real world
* Solid, n-tier architecture design
* Using the .NET data management classes to access and update a data store
* Maintaining data integrity by efficiently resolving concurrency errors
* Techniques for building reusable, task-specific data tier components
* How to design applications to exploit many different kinds of client device

Editorial Reviews

From the Publisher

ASP.NET is a huge advance from previous incarnations of ASP, with one of its goals being pure HTML output that achieves maximum cross-browser compatibility. The server-side event architecture tends to engender this approach, but amid the first flush of excitement it's often forgotten that there's still a place for rich clients, and handling data in a multitude of places. Distributed data-driven applications aren't new, but the range of possibilities and ease of development have both increased with the introduction of .NET.

This book concentrates on the use of ASP.NET for building applications for Internet or Intranet use, and looking at the possibilities that rich clients brings to both application design and a better user experience. There often appears to be confusion over how the new .NET data management and page-processing models fit into the overall distributed application architecture, how it changes this, and how it provides exciting new opportunities. So we spend some time exploring the whole architecture and design issue, and see how it can be addressed in different ways.

About the Author

Dave Sussman is a hacker in the traditional sense of the word. That's someone who likes playing with code and working out how things work, which is why he spends much of his life working with beta software. Luckily this coincides with writing about new technologies, giving him an output for his poor English and grammar. He lives in a small village in the Oxfordshire countryside. Like many programmers everywhere he has an expensive hi-fi, a big TV and no life.

Alex Homer is a computer geek and Web developer with a passion for ASP.NET. Although he has to spend some time doing real work (a bit of consultancy and training, and the occasional conference session), most of his days are absorbed in playing with the latest Microsoft Web technology and then writing about it. Living in the picturesque wilderness of the Derbyshire Dales in England, he is well away from the demands of the real world – with only an Internet connection to maintain some distant representation of normality. But, hey, what else could you want from life?

Product Details

• Paperback: 600 pages
• Publisher: Wrox Press; 1st edition (April 2002)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 1861004923
• ISBN-13: 978-1861004925
• Product Dimensions: 8.8 x 7.1 x 1.7 inches
• Shipping Weight: 2.4 pounds
• Average Customer Review: 4.3 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (6 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #3,402,184 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

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Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

11 of 12 people found the following review helpful:

4.0 out of 5 stars Indepth and focused; targeted at a developer, November 14, 2002

By 

Steven A. Smith (Kent, OH United States) - See all my reviews
(REAL NAME)   

This review is from: ASP.NET Distributed Data Applications (Paperback)

...

The Good

There are a lot of things to like about this book if your main interest is in data driven applications that require many remote devices to be able to update data on a central server, possibly after being disconnected for some period of time. I've personally skirted such projects several times in my ASP3 consulting days, but thankfully never had to build one, mainly because at that time the infrastructure was not there to support such applications within the budgets of my clients. Today, however, that's changed, and I think we will see more and more commercial applications being written that use the kind of distributed data techniques described in this book.

In addition to the source code files and a other resources available on the website, the authors have also set up several live examples from their book. This is something I wish more books would do, since I think it really helps readers to be able to see examples from the book in action. Especially since so many book examples don't work, so seeing them working on a live server helps to reassure the user that the code does in fact work. Obviously, this works best if the source for the online examples is also available, and for this book, it is. ... >Another thing I like about the book is that it uses a fairly consistent scenario for its examples, that of an ECommerce store. While certainly there are plenty of books out there that have used this particular scenario for their examples, what sets this book apart is that it takes it to the next level. In addition to the tried-and-true postback and web form examples, this book covers data update scenarios using rich clients, remoting, web services, client-side XML, and more. If your users are not sitting at a desk with a constant Internet connection but they still need to update data in your systems, this book's examples can take you further than any other ASP.NET book out there today.

In addition to covering data applications across a variety of clients, the authors also hit on topics like how to set up an efficient concurrency control mechanism and how to handle conflicts that occur during data updates. Another feature covered by the book is the use of components for data access, something I am a big proponent of. Encapsulating data access logic into components has many benefits, which this book explains in one of its early chapters.

There is a lot of very practical information in this book. Be warned, however, that this is not (and was not intended to be) a reference book or an academic overview. This is a book for programmers, and specifically experienced programmers who are faced with the challenges of managing distributed data applications using ASP.NET.

The Less Good

There were only a few things about this book that I could think of to mention in this section of my review, and none of them are particularly bad. However, I tend to think that a review that doesn't include at least a little constructive criticism hasn't really accomplished its objective.

As I mentioned, I really favor using components for data access. Chapter 2 of this book covers a wide range of functions for returning various data types from such components, but one thing it lacks is any coverage of code generators or helpers. In this case, although the code described in the book is solid, it is also some of the most dull code in the world to write and occupies a huge portion of the total lines of code in any given application. As such, it should be automatically generated or reduced through the use of helper libraries as much as possible. I can't blame the authors too much, since data components was not really the focus of the book and spending any more time on them would have probably been off-topic. ...

Beyond this minor criticism, the only other thing I found myself disliking about the book is that it is so focused on solving the actual problems that, not having a need to solve those problems at the moment, I found myself losing interest from time to time. This is not really a criticism of the book, since it is dedicated to helping developers who are "in the trenches" trying to solve these problems. There is perhaps a need for a similar (probably smaller) companion book that would provide a higher-level view of the issues covered by this book, and would be appropriate for a project leader or architect, as opposed to a developer.

Overall, this book provides deep coverage of its topic with a huge amount of practical code and examples, and would be an excellent addition to the library of any developer who will be faced with the challenges of distributed data applications using ASP.NET.

3 of 3 people found the following review helpful:

4.0 out of 5 stars 4 stars, but..., August 26, 2002

By 

David Douglass (Bloomingdale, NJ) - See all my reviews
(REAL NAME)   

This review is from: ASP.NET Distributed Data Applications (Paperback)

This book is practical and well written. If you want to write the type of app they cover, you'll find all the nitty-gritty details here. I deducted a star because the book goes into too much detail; it gets boring. They should have assumed a sharper reader and picked up the pace.

BUT... Do you really want to build the type of app they spend the most time on? This would be an app that makes heavy use of XML and DOM within IE (no discussion of XML and DOM in other browsers) to simulate a true client/server architecture. It all seems very complicated, error prone, and hard to maintain.

P. S. You could learn a lot for free just by downloading and examining the sample code from the Wrox web site.

3 of 3 people found the following review helpful:

4.0 out of 5 stars More than a mouthful.., July 6, 2002

By 

Alex Dresko (Greenville, SC) - See all my reviews

This review is from: ASP.NET Distributed Data Applications (Paperback)

If you're anything like me, you've spent the past couple of months dredging over hundreds of pages worth of material online... and like most, you've probably said to yourself, "How does it all fit together and how do I use .NET effectively to build a distributed data application?"

This is the book that, for me at least, closed the gap. I had remained dormant on a project for days due to important design decisions that I needed to make BEFORE I started programming. Unfortunately, I didn't have the answer and I couldn't find what I wanted online.

This book goes WAY beyond what I thought I needed to know and contains a magnitude of information that I didn't realize I needed to know!