Customer Reviews

ASP.NET 3.5 Social Networking

5 star:		(6)
4 star:		(2)
3 star:		(2)
2 star:		(0)
1 star:		(0)

 

 

This is an excellent book for anyone contemplating the development of a social networking web site using ASP.NET, although you may find the cutting edge technology used to be a little too advanced if you are only familiar with the ASP.NET Framework. The most useful aspect of the application design will be the database schema which meets the project requirements in a well thought out manner.

There are a few social networking features that are not covered like threaded comments and user profiles that can be customized using CSS but other common features are implemented including tag clouds and content rating.

Although this is a thick book, 556 pages, most of the content is code listings so it won't actually take you too long to read it. Building a social networking web application is a huge project which a solitary developer could hardly manage alone so just reading this book is not going to get you there.

I am a Consultant who started to look into Domain Drive Design, Test Driven Design, and Model View Presenter when thrown into a recent gig. It's been very challenging on my own time with my daily work duties to get caught up on these improved methods for developing highly scalable, enterprise ready solutions. I was so thankful this book came along. I am only on chapter 3 + having read the two appendixes (they are around 100 pages together) I have started to understand everything at an amazing pace. Not only is the subject matter fun (who doesn't have a Myspace or Facebook page and wonder, how would i do that if i wrote it?) it also features a plethora of open source tools and tips. Not to mention the author gets amazing kudos for even mentioning ReSharper *my favorite 3rd party tool* he also includes tips and tricks throughout the book on better ways to use it. If you are college grad looking to see how a real development team would build a enterprise product or even a veteran developer looking to sharpen his skill sets in this new age of collaboration and technology (yes world we are already on .net 3.5, not to mention 2.0 has existed for some time!) this is the book for you to get.

*Another thing off topic but might be interesting to some.*

Most of my work is done in SharePoint and I feel that as a bonus to learning these new methodologies I am also getting some cool ideas to help me extend SharePoint in a more collaborative way. Even though this book has nothing to do with SharePoint. DDD and MVP lend itself well to SharePoint development.

If you are still unsure go to the publishers website download appendix A and B and get what I feel are huge bonuses to an amazing book. Appendix B is a great quick start guide to test driven design.

I have read quite a few books on [..] and by far this is the best. Additionally this book showcases some of the best open source tools available to improve productivity and goes a step further by explaining how these tools form a great integrated development environment.

With Microsoft coming up with so many new things in short intervals its difficult to keep up the pace. This books comes handy as it explains the new concepts, well known [...] areas and usage of open source tools by walking through creation of a robust and scalable social networking site.

Bottom line - Highly recommended !!!

This book has a lot of useful information about social network design. But if you want it for the social networking framework it comes with, then I recommend skipping the book. You can download the framework project; it's available open-source on CodePlex. And you'll spend a long time just to get it to work, only to realize it's just not flexible enough to be re-used. For example, to import contacts, it uses Outlook (who in the world imports social contacts from their Outlook), and it leaves out the important contacts importing scenarios, like MSN, Gmail, Facebook, etc... So you'll end up writing your code from scratch.

My son and his friends are just getting into social networking. They are all studying computer programming and wanted a good grasp of basics. This book was very good. I am also a computer programmer by profession. I liked the content and felt it was pretty up to date.
Well worth the price --(as other reviewers have stated)!

I have been happy to read this book. I had approximatly ½ year ASP.NET experience when I started reading the book 2 months ago and I actually understood everything that Andrew Siemer did. Siemer has just the right way of explaining things, not wasting time on things you already should know (You need to have a basic knowledge of ASP.NET to read this book) and otherwise clear and intelligent. He very beuatifully demonstrates the MVP pattern in his architecture, if you wanna do a social network in ASP.NET, this is the book. One little problem about the book is that it is written just when ASP.NET MVC was released, Siemer himself acknowledges that in the book, but he couldn't use this new technology because it was simply too young and unproven at the time. I don't know that much about MVC, but maybe if you wanna do a MVP web application MVC supports that better? Anyway it has been a great tour with Siemers out on the praeries of ASP.NET with the MVP pattern and social networking, with high too the sky and fresh air and a super intelligent and helpful guy right next to you. Also Siemers makes use of various open source software along the way, that is also great, because apparently the Microsoft solution is not always the best one.

I'm happy with the purchase of this book. I'm in the process of building a website with some social networking aspects so i was hoping this book would eliminate some of the grunt work, and it does.

The author does a good job of explaining his architecture methodologies and decisions. It probably helps if you are familiar with some principles of enterprise architecture to begin with so that you aren't locked strictly into the authors design patterns. I've taken some of andrews ideas and mixed them with my own, and i'm happy with the results.

The best part, as i alluded to before, is that the author has written all of the database schemas, business and data layers, and wrapper and service classes needed to get you started with a social networking site. Even though you probably won't use everything he did, you can still use a lot of it and it saves a lot of typing and thinking if you're starting from scratch. He also has a lot of good ideas and uses many open source technologies that are available. (Even though personally i'm sticking with enterprise library for some things like DI.) As one reviewer alluded to the author does used Linq to Sql as opposed to entity framework, but i had no problem with this. If you want to use entity framework you can just swap out your domain model, no big deal.

Make sure you download the sample site from codeplex so you don't have to type everything from scratch. The appendices are online too. It will be a while before my site is ready to go live but i think this book will be a great asset in getting it code complete.

This book is important if you're "into" social networking.

There are problems with the book - it has an "open source" feeling to it, where you're expected to be able to make things work. I didn't like this. I like things polished. However:
1. The book is written with humor.
2. The author knows what he's talking about.
[...]
4. I'm learning lots and lots of stuff from the book.

5 stars.

I picked up this book to reinforce some ASP.NET concepts as my day job consists of maintaining legacy code and I don't have the opportunity to keep my .NET skills current. The author is very knowledgeable of the subject matter and does explain a lot about what goes in to an "enterprise" application.

One thing I didn't like, however, is that he repeatedly says how he's going to use Test Driven Development (TDD) but unless I missed something he dives right in and says how to go about creating the code without starting from the tests first like TDD says; just from skimming the first few chapters I didn't see much if anything in regards to the tests, it's all actual business code which TDD states should *never* exist without a corresponding test. I've only started reading the book, however, so it might show up later down the road, or perhaps writing the tests is left as an exercise to the reader.

I'm still finding this to be a really great book and would highly recommend it to someone who knows .NET (He says you should know ASP.NET 3.5 already but I'm coming with knowledge of 2.0), has gone through the tutorials on the ASP.NET site, and now wants something meatier to learn how to develop a "real" application using real world practices.

This book fills a much needed gap in web development, specifically building a social networking website. It is interesting that there are not very many open source social networking platforms based on .net, most are in PHP, or Python, and run on the LAMP stack, this gives some much needed competition.

The core design of the system is pretty well decouples, and adhears to Separations of Concerns, and Single Responsability Principal, not much duplicate code either, however i think the choice of Linq To Sql was unfortunate since it is clear Microsoft will be abandoning it and should have used EF or other alternatives like NHibernate or the many other Repositories. The good news is that the code is designed well enough it isn't too hard to swap out the persistance providers.

I was also Surprised they didn't use the "Visual Studio for Database Professionals" for the database since it would be a lot easier then the nant and scripting goodness they jumped through to get it to work right. (I understand VS database edition costs some serious money or did, and it isn't as open as the ALT.NET tooling)

The features are lacking for the shipped source code, and tests are pretty slim, but it is a good starting point, just surprised it shipped without complete and functional source code.

I tried to get the admin-site working and can't find anywhere in the book or source code readme's on how to get a login with access (adding permissions in db doesn't appear to be enough) but i will forgive all these shortcomings for the fact this is the first offering of its kind in our space and welcome the contributions this book provides.

I hope the code gets cleaned up or an open source social platform gets released based on the code, it is pretty neat what is possible with the latest coming out of redmond.