Customer Reviews

Building an ASP.NET Intranet

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

 

 

Having installed and made a few (trivial) changes to the IBuySpy portal application, I decided to get this book in order to make sure that I didn't 'miss any tricks'.
The book doesn't disappoint. It's a good overview of the application with detailed instructions on the installation process and operational level usage of the product.

A useful discussion of the portal architecture is followed by detailed discussions of the underlying concepts of security, specific modules, content and document management.
Finally, there is an analysis of a new module - Human resources management, in which all the issues that you would normally have to deal with in a real-world development are met.

The only real disappointment was that the download code listed in the book was not yet available from Wrox.com - no doubt that will be resolved in short order.

There are more than a thousand instances of the IBuySpy portal already on the web, with many hundreds more in the making. This book is an ideal introduction to the subject.

This is the book I have been waiting for! Since last summer, when ASP.NET was (somewhat) introduced and the best practices app IBuySpy was released, I and others have awaited a tome that would walk us through the process of building an ASP.NET intranet step-by-step and this book is it.

It starts off by highlighting what is important to have in an intranet but it quickly gets down to the nitty-gritty of (1) dissecting IBuySpy and (2) showing how to customize and extend the IBS application to a full fledged intranet portal. Their explanations are well written and concise and there were a number of topics that I was able to finally understand.

This book is not exactly for newbies, but for the person that has gotten their feet wet with ASP.NET and wants to get his or her hands dirty with a serious project.

I only have one negative point about this book and it is the reason I gave it 4 stars instead of 5. No CD and No online code.

I do not know about the rest of you, but I would have prefered to spend an extra 5-10 dollars not to have to type all of this code over again. Additionally, the authors use an abstracted database class in all of their code that is supposed to be downloadable from the WROX website, but, at this time, is not available, which was very frustrating. The upside is, I ended up re-writing it myself, so I actually ended up learning more!

All in all, a good book and well worth the price.

I bought this book in hopes of using it to design a good intranet portal for our company. The book is written poorly and doesn't really help you implement the modules discussed in the book. I have tried countless times to implement what was discussed in the book but the code never works, I am using the code which was downloaded from the publisher's website so it should work according to their instructions. Another downside is the author no longer supports the code in the book so if problems happens you are on your own, I would think a publisher would support their own code and be able to answer questions about it. Needless to say I am extremely disappointed with the book, I had high hopes for it but it just didn't work the way it should have.

I bought this book because I have been thrust into the Intranet development world, and I really don't have a lot of experience building multi-functional web pages. I bought this book to really help me understand the IBuySpy portal, and I have used it to customize that package for a couple of different web sites now.

The Good:
The book is very good at explaining the various components of the IBuySpy Portal. It's a lot like a tourist map; highlighting certain pieces (while complete overlooking other aspects).

The Bad:
As others have noted, this book doesn't go deep into explaining ASP.NET, or how to use classes in the .NET architecture. It merely allows you to copy a lot of code, cross your fingers, and see something work.

The Ugly:
As with most "best-of-breed" solutions from Microsoft, stuff breaks. While this particular manual does point out why some stuff doesn't work as well as intended, it doesn't go into a lot of detail (and don't expect it to catch everything).

In Sum: Buy this book if you have a need to get an intranet up and running quickly, and want to impress your non-developer friends. Don't buy it if you're expecting to use it to learn ASP.NET.

After Reading All The Book I think that this book deal very well with intranet applications but it is specific to understanding and upgrading the IBuySpy Portal Application but you can always use this knowldge in order to develop other intranet applications ,instead of building everything from ground up the authors learn us how to take advantage of an existing applications distributed freely and customise it .
I gave the book 4 stars because the source code distributed with the book is in VB.Net and there is no C# version like other WROX Books and I hope that WROX will distibute the C# version of the source code soon .

I really like the approach that this book takes. Using the IBuySpy example means that all the mailing lists and forums about it will be useful.

The explanations in the early chapters really cleared up how IBuySpy works for me. Especially on security.

The later chapters led me through some great coding techniques.

The download worked fine for me. I guess the authors sorted it out since those previous reviews.

[...]

I picked this book up about three years to late, as it is entirely written about the original IBuySpy Portal framework, and I am an avid DotNetNuke module developer. The author presents numerous great examples of custom module development for IBuySpy, including a simple library application, extended discussions module, a complex Human Resources module, and a great Document Management System. Keep in mind IBuySpy is the forerunner to DotNetNuke, and all of the modules outlined in the book port nicely to the newer architecture, as they leverage many of the features moved forward into DotNetNuke, like user account integration, portal security, and more.

As I worked through configuring the various samples provided with the book, I got to set up & play with the original IBuySpy Portal framework after nearly three years of playing with it for the for the first time. When it was first released, it very intimidating in some of it's implementation details, although it didn't appear as sophisticated in it's business architecture, unlike the original Reports, Time Tracking, & Issue Tracking kits.

The book provides one of the best guides I have read to everything IBuySpy. The second time looking at IBuySpy portal, I was more able to appreciate the great concepts introduced in it, and I was at times amazed at how simple the IBuySpy Portal is when compared to the latest version of DotNetNuke. With the Introduction of the DotNetNuke Data Access Layer (DAL) in version 2.x, DotNetNuke was able to encapsulate all of the sophistication, and more, of the business layer found in the Time Tracking/Reports starter kits, at which point I was hooked.

I found the Document Management System described in Chapter 9 sophisticated enough that I believed it was worth the effort to convert it to a modern DotNetNuke module. The module is very well designed and documented in the book, so I decided on an uneventful Sunday afternoon to start converting it. Approximately 40 hours of development later, I have completed converting the module to DotNetNuke 2.1.2 (DotNetNuke 3.0.9 was released two days before the writing of this review).

In order to use this book effectively, you really need a good understanding of SQL and SQL stored procedures. The book isn't for SQL Beginners. The tables come from WROX without the identities being set, so you will need to know how to do that. The book also requires a good understanding of stored procedures, you will need to know how to fix the stored procedure if it isn't working correctly. The easy way to work with the stored procedures and all of the changes the WROX programmers made to IBUYSPY is to load their backup database onto your server using a different database name, then import the tables and stored procedures you need into your Portal database. There are some problems with the code that requires revising the name spaces and assembly references to get them to work with the ASPNET Portal, but once modified the code does work well for the most part. I really wish the WROX programmers had spent more time on the RTF piece. I eventually replaced the RTF functionality with someone else's software, but I have to admit that I learned alot about ASP.NET controls by examining the WROX RTF code. The document management piece is worth the price of the book. The documentation really is not very good but if you study the code, you'll learn alot. I disagree strongly with the reviewer who stated this is for people who want code but don't want to learn what it does. If you can make the WROX code work, you're doing pretty well.

I bought this book for 62 Euros (75 USD) in Lisbon that is too much for 450 pages (with promos, content, indexes, images from internet) book without any CD and with broken promise of the downloadable code!

IMHO, there was no need to bloat the volume of a book and reader's tiredness reprinting from internet the lengthy code examples just for the sake of a few modifications and after that again printing, again, the resulting snippets (it is proper only for e-books)

Since the book is oriented for working with codes, the absence of electronic version is also the great drawback.

The book seems to be the monopolist on IBuySpy Portal (the only one available) , but I wouldn't have bought it, had I known about mentioned above.

While the book is useful (in abscence of any other choice, esp. in electronic version), I estimate the ratio "price/worthyness" as extremely high

PS
I was also more interested in C# and/or Visual Studio .NET versions of IBuySpy Portal, and I think VB.NET is just inappropriate language for the middle-, like IBuySpy Portal,
and large-size projects)

I didn't much care for this book. It never really explains the how or why, it just lists code. "Now we'll add an edit button: <code...> Now we'll add a delete button: <code...>". There's no explanation of what the code means, how the ASP pages link to the code-behind pages, etc.

I'm not sure who the target audience is. It's not technical enough for geeky types, but too technical for administrative types. I guess it's aimed at script kiddy types who want to copy code without really understanding how it works.