Customer Reviews

ASP.NET 3.5 Enterprise Application Development with Visual Studio 2008: Problem Design Solution (Wrox Programmer to Programmer)

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I read through this book thinking, with a title like "ASP.NET 3.5 Enterprise Application Development with Visual Studio 2008," that it would take me through creating an enterprise-class application, complete with all of the things one would think are a part of such an app. As it turns out, I think the title should be something more like "Introduction to N-Tier Development in ASP.NET."

Each chapter is set up in the same format, and it's a decent format - outline the problem, explain the design, implement the solution. The chapters are:

1) A Framework for Enterprise Applications
2) The Data Access Layer
3) Designing the Business Logic Layer
4) The User Interface Layer
5) Exception Handling
6) Role-Based Security
7) The Workflow Engine
8) Notifications
9) Reporting
10) The Query Builder Control
11) The Dashboard
12) Auditing
13) Code Generator

If you go in never having built a multi-tier app where you separate your data access from your business logic and your UI, this is a good intro to that. The explanation of the separation and showing how to keep those things separated is a good education for the ASP.NET developer who has only ever just thrown a DataSource on a page and let the controls do the work.

If you have any experience with multi-tier apps, though, the goodness, unfortunately, is not to be found. Even if you have a light amount of experience, I probably wouldn't recommend this book since it could do more damage than help. There are several reasons for this.

First, there are little things through the code that are just bad practice.

The naming conventions for everything in this book are absolutely horrible. "ENTBaseBO" is the name of the base class that all enterprise business objects derive from. The names only get worse and more unintelligible and distracting from there. When cruising through the method bodies presented you sometimes wonder if he's using Hungarian notation in C# and then you realize that it's just bad naming.

Almost every exception that gets thrown in the code is the generic System.Exception type. Even if a more specific exception type would be more appropriate, it's always a general Exception.

Rather than overriding the ToString() method on business objects, a new "GetDisplayText()" method gets added in one of the myriad base classes which gets used throughout the book when displaying the object in UI.

The data access layer uses the Microsoft Patterns and Practices Data Access Application Block, which is good... but the book urges you to use an old version of it "because it's simple to use and easy to understand" - even though the new one has many improvements over the old.

Larger things start creeping up on you once you get past the smaller stuff.

There's no localization and no mention of it. Every string seen in any UI is hardcoded somewhere in the system (not necessarily just in the UI) rather than being stored in resource files. Even if you only plan on supporting one language, it's still good practice to separate your strings from your code.

There are no tests anywhere and no mention of them. We're building an enterprise application and we're not going to test it? Really?

Rather than use standard functions built into ASP.NET like the SiteMapProvider and navigation controls that can bind to it, a lot of effort goes into writing your own site map management system and custom controls to bind to that proprietary system. Role-based security that doesn't hook into the RoleProvider.

Chapter 7, on "the workflow engine," is almost 100 pages showing you how to write a proprietary state machine workflow system. I actually had to flip back and look at the cover to make sure we were in .NET 3.5, then I got really curious as to why this wasn't a 10 page chapter showing how easy that sort of thing is to implement using Windows Workflow Foundation, which comes for free with the .NET framework.

Why is the "code generator" chapter about creating a Visual Studio wizard but has no mention of T4 or any third-party code generator? With all the code generation options out there, would I really want to roll my own using StringBuilders?

Other stuff just sits in the background and bugs at you more subconsciously. The code snippets in places are inconsistently formatted and hard to read. You start wondering why there's a little bit of logic in stored procedures and a little bit of logic in the data access layer and a little bit of logic in the business layer and whether there might have been a way to break that up in a way that would be more maintainable. No mention at all of design patterns. No mention of MVP or MVC.

Long story already too long, if you've never written an n-tier application, if you're used to just creating a single web application project that just has pages in it that were created in the Visual Studio designer and that's it... this book will give you some ideas about how to change the way you look at your application's structure and separate the logic out of the codebehind of your pages into different layers. If you have written any sort of n-tier application before, this is most likely not for you.

Read this book recently and found out how clear and concise the author explained how to build an application from beginning to end, with alot of extras also.

The author did a great job explaining the concept of building an n-tier web application and why it was import to have the separation. The reading was easy to understand and follow, as were the sample codes. Explanations of the code were very detailed, which made comprehending the code easy.

Another interesting concept the author added was the email service application that he included. It was a very "neat" way of implementing how notifications are sent out.

I would highly recommend this book to anybody looking to learn ASP.NET as well as building an enterprise level applicaton!!!

The ASP.NET Enterprise Application Development book, which is part of the Problem/Design/Solution series, is setup as a book that illustrates the problem first, then moves to the design (and looks at various design possibilities), and finishes up with the solution to implement. The sample project for this book is a time-tracking opportunity, an application to log employee's time.

Each chapter of the book looks to layout the fundamentals of a business application, starting with the data access, business, and presentation layers. The rest of the book is spent looking at the various features that the application needed (exception handling, security, workflow, etc.). Most of the scenarios in the chapters use a code-specific implementation to solving the problem, rather than using other tools available to developers (for instance, the workflow chapter doesn't leverage Windows Workflow Foundation). Though there are a few tools used, like Crystal Reports and Enterprise Library.

The book has an interesting approach in how it implements the business logic; business applications are much different than personal web sites and other application types because they depend on the success of their business rules. That is one of the focuses of the book, setting up how to structure your code so that you may handle the various business needs of the application.

The chapters that create specific features for the application (reporting, workflow, etc.) use a code-specific approach to creating these features. The book lays out the changes to the database and data model, illustrates the stored procedures for the change, and then moves into the design solution. Each new feature has a new ASP.NET page that he demonstrates fully along with any changes to styles, master pages, etc. Each book discusses the chapter to the fullest detail, from the proc to the finished solution.

The style of the book typically follows the explanation of the business problem at the beginning. When the book illustrates code, the author shows the code first, and follows up with an explanation of the solution. In the design section, the book does discuss the various components that it does use to complete the solution (such as Crystal Reports for reporting and Enterprise Library for exception handling).

I was hoping the book was going to look more into using various design patterns within ASP.NET. Although there are some, the architecture is pretty much the same throughout the application. Additionally, the UI later doesn't use much ASP.NET AJAX JavaScript implementations or a script library like JQuery, but leverages most of the logic on the server-side and, when necessary, leverages the update panel control.

While I don't know that I would use the same architecture, I do like some of the features he implemented in the app and look to see how I may utilize this for my own development.

For those who've been waiting for ASP.NET 3.5 Website Programming: Problem - Design - Solution to arrive, wait no further -- there's a great ASP.NET 3.5 P-D-S book on the shelves right now, and this is it.

This book faithfully follows the very popular Wrox "Problem - Design - Solution" format, evolving chapter by chapter while analyzing business requirements, examining various design scenarios, and implementing a beginning-to-end solution in a reusable framework. The book uses LINQ to SQL for data access (though you could easily adapt this to Entity Framework or your third-party ORM of choice), and unlike the BeerHouse books, the emphasis is more on developing line-of-business applications. It covers a lot of important material the 3.5 BeerHouse book won't go into, such as workflow, notification, reporting, and auditing. It also incorporates a number of current architectural trends, such as dynamic querying, code generation, and so on.

For those not familiar with author Vince Varallo, you are in for a treat. His writing style is clear, concise, and easy to follow. Explanations are well-detailed and are liberally augmented by code samples.

Still waiting for your BeerHouse fix? I urge you to give ASP.NET 3.5 Enterprise Application Development with Visual Studio 2008 Problem - Design - Solution a shot. All in all, a very highly recommended read.

I purchased this book with high hopes as I'm currently developing an enterprise wide n-tiered ASP.NET 3.5 solution. It definitely delivered! This book allowed me to hit the ground running with my new application. The author did a great job with the code sample presentations....they are very clear and well organized. I especially found the LINQ code to be useful. I highly recommend this book if you're serious about using ASP.NET 3.5 for an enterprise level web application.

Lee Dumond's review of this book is spot on. Vince's design pattern is smart and extensible. I finished this book a couple of months ago and adapted all of it to Entity Framework 4.0. It's a great learning experience in itself.
If your'e getting into n-tier development and asp.net you won't go wrong with this book.

I just wish Vince would do another book using the Problem-Design-Solution pattern for Entity Framework. Lee Dumond was supposed to do one, but that fell through. In my opinion, Wrox's P-D-S pattern is the best way to learn a new techology.

Last month I bought this book. I found it easy to learn!!

This book is clear and well organized. Author show his opinion on best practices. I found those practices are the best so far.

It guides you how to create 3-tier on ASP.NET 3.5 using .NET 3.5. This book is very strong on using LINQ, WF, WebPart, and ASP.NET. Also you will find interesting topics on enterprise application like Role-Based Access Control, Dashboard, Notification and Reporting System, and auditing data.

Good Book! I wrote this because I found this book is very easy to learn and no one reviewed this book. So let me be the first.

I would wholeheartedly and highly recommend this book to anyone who is serious about learning the best practices a programmer needs to build an Enterprise application using ASP.NET 3.5

It's under 500 pages, and I found it to be very easy to read and understand. The book also keeps you away from all the extraneous info which divert a reader from the current topic. The author did a good job at explaining in detail all the IMP topics in building a real world EA, discussing each topic in detail and highlighting some of the best ways of doing handling each one of those. It's not one of those too much info and boring Professor-to-Student books, but more of a interesting Lead Architect-to-Programmer book.

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This book uses Linq-To-Sql which has pretty much been replaced by Entity Framework. Microsoft is urging people to use Entity Framework, so in that sense this book didnt pretty much deliver for being such a new book. The books itself is good, but if it was written using Entity Framework it would have been really worth it.