Customer Reviews

Deploying .NET Applications: Learning MSBuild and ClickOnce (Expert's Voice in .NET)

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

 

 

This is just an overview summary of MSBuild. Lots of properties are mentioned but no indication of how to use them and what the parameters are. However, it seems to be the only book on the market. Read this book first then you must go to MSDN to get the details. MSBuild in general is not very well documented. These authors do not give any practical examples unfortunately.

The author is apparently quite knowledgeable in MSBuild & ClickOnce, and shared some of the insights in this book, such as how to customize your build. The main negative is that, he sometimes just jumps into a topic or use a term without properly explaining the the fundamentals. For example, incremental build is a big topic that's not properly explained.

It's would have been much better to give a clear "problem statement" about the fundamental problem that incremental build is supposed to solve, then describe how this can be done logically, then show how the specific technology (ie msbuild) does this; but he tends to belabor the technologies used instead.

Another problem is that the author didnt do his homework well and incorrectly described several terms: e.g he said SCM stands for "Source Control Management", which we all know should be Software Configuration Management. He said BITS is Binary Intelligent Transfer Service (when it should be Background ...). This sort of things tend to undermine his credibility.

This book explains how to use ClickOnce in Real-World Scenarios. It does not only explain what you need to do to get ClickOnce running with your app, but also how things work behind the scenes, and why MS built ClickOnce the way they did. First we were a bit shy to use ClickOnce, because we thought it might be just another bloated MS Technology. Thanks to Sayeds Book, however, we spared the work to write our own solution, and we are confident to have the right solution for our needs. Thanks, Sayed!

I like the way this book is laid out and I like the examples. It is particularly useful to be able to download the examples and look at the code firsthand. This author actually reads his email and was willing to explain an item in more detail for me. I'm sure this book would be helpful to anyone needing to learn more about deployment using these methods.

If you are new to using MSBuild or TeamBuild, don't waste your time trying to read instructions on Micosoft's site. Buy this book first and then go back to MS site later to get more information. Hashimi did a good job presenting an intro to MSBuild.

I only read the first 5 chapters because the other chapters don't apply to me yet, and I thought they were straight forward and easy to understand.

If you are familiar with MSBuild, unless you are trying to get info on Click once, using Microsoft's website will be the way to go to get more in depth info on MSBuild.

Excerpt from C# Online.NET (CSharp-Online.NET) Review:

"Deploying .NET Applications is a very readable little book designed to teach .NET developers the new deployment technologies. It covers virtually all of the deployment scenarios you might encounter. It works through numerous deployment examples using various options. And, it shows you how to extend MSBuild with custom loggers and tasks."