Customer Reviews

Brownfield Application Development in .Net

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I am a huge fan of technical books published by Manning. The Brownfield Application Development in .Net book is very useful for developers who work on Brownfield projects and one of my favourites. It is technically accurate, but I personally gained most from the chapters which explained the politics and participants of a Brownfield project. The "stories from the trenches" sections were fun to read and often made me smirk.

I started reading this book while I was working on a Brownfield application project. I knew from the start of the project that the task will be challenging. This book helped to maintain a positive attitude and gather my wits when the project became depressing. Sometimes it is just good to know that someone, somewhere were in a similar situation before and prevailed.

I wish there were more books like this; there are just a few enjoyable books about Software Ecosystem. Software Ecosystem in relation to Legacy / Brownfield apps is often misunderstood and usually documented by academics and not practitioners.

I've been meaning to read this book for a while and finally did!!

Don't let the title fool you, it could have been "Modern Object Oriented development with .NET". In the context of improving an existing active project (brownfield) this books walks you through separation of concerns, isolating dependencies, test driven development and many other concepts in a very practical and easy to understand way.

They also cover many of the political, cultural and personality issues you will face working with any company or team and suggest ways to work around, mitigate and sell new ideas into a situation. It is very easy to go with the flow but having the confidence to buck the flow on occasion can be a big win for everyone!

This was a good book for me. I was trained as an electrical engineer and spent 20 years designing computers before taking a turn into application development 17 years ago. I read constantly, listen to podcasts and hang around a lot of very smart people so have picked up most of the modern software design patterns. The advantage of applying particular patterns is not always clear so it takes a while to work new things into my development methodology.. mostly a good thing.

I thought the book did a good job of putting many concepts into a more comprehensive context than is normally presented. This approach has given me many good ideas about how I can better apply the techniques and motivation to investigate a few things I have ignored.

I started reading this book and felt I was hearing a summary of my current project(which made me feel good, I am not alone). After reading it I realized that I have never worked on a Greenfield project. The book has good tips and tricks for the real problems that developers deal with.

This book provides guidance on identifying pain points in project development and then resolving them.

The first half of the book covers topics of infrastructure to support the project development. Topics covered include version control, build automation, automated tests, code metrics,

The second half is about the code, and covers OOP principles, layering, refactoring, and dependency management.

Very useful to have handy when reviewing projects for pain points and friction areas.

The first few times I saw this book and thought about it, I thought it would be mostly repetition of original material that could just as well be looked up somewhere else. Eventually I had a closer look at the book and saw its worth:

First, while it indeed doesn't contain much original material, it is an excellent compilation of generally accepted best practices in software development (version control, continuous integration, unit testing, logical layering, refactoring UI and data access code, etc.).

What makes this even better is that I find the explanations of these best practices far more accessible than what I've seen in other places, such as in articles on the internet. For example, while the comparison of various UI patterns doesn't go into depth, it's very good at pointing at the core differences. I haven't yet seen something as easily accessible as this.

Third, this book is not *just* about code. The authors keep pointing out that software development also includes political and social aspects that can hinder code improvement if not approached the right way. That's something all too easily forgotten (depending on in what kind of team one works).

Lastly, the book isn't just theoretical. It's built around fictional short stories of developers going about their daily tasks to show where, and how, code ought to be improved. These "stories" get to the relevant points very quickly and I could easily identify with the portrayed situations. The book then usually gives some theory on how to refactor, and goes on demonstrating such a refactoring.

In conclusion, I clearly underestimated that book at first -- it's in fact a highly useful concrete guide for software improvement.

This book targets developer teams working on maintaining and adding features to Brownfield Applications, old (or not) codebases which are still under active development and where you constantly find hidden gems.

It focusses on strategies to try and improve the quality of that sort of beast and therefore our day-to-day developer life.

It does a great job at covering good practices, both in the software development process (issue tracking and management, automation of tests and builds, deployment) and in good programming principles (OO principles). It is full of directly applicable tips and helps avoiding the well-known traps that can show up when improving the application.

In addition to developers working on brownfield applications, I would recommend it to any developer who needs a good overview of the Software development process and good practices.

I found that it also helped improve my morale regarding the terrible codebase I am working on.

I wasn't expecting much from the book, since browfield projects are very different and the more broad the subject, the more difficult it is to say interesting and relevant things. However, I was up to surprise.
The book has a lot of solid advices and rules of thumbs. It suggests solutions and is very practical.
There are some chapters, which I believe are less relevant. Not because they are empty of content, but rather because they are common knowledge. For instance, I am not realy aware of any project that does not use version controll or bug database. Granted, there are some that dont use them correctly.

Overall, I would highly recommend this book to any brownfield developer, which are basically all of us :)