Expert C# Business Objects (Books for Professionals by Professionals) [Paperback]

Rockford Lhotka (Author)

Book Description

ISBN-10: 1590593448 | ISBN-13: 978-1590593448 | Publication Date: July 6, 2004 | Edition: 1

This book is a translation of Rockford Lhotka's industry-standard title Expert One-on-One Visual Basic .NET Business Objects into C# language. Lhotka's ideas remain extremely influential in .NET development, and this book translates those ideas directly to you, the C# programmer.

Expert C# Business Objects reveals the opportunities available through .NET. You will learn to make informed decisions about developing your enterprise C# projects. Further, you will learn how to successfully trade off between performance and flexibility.

This book contains the author’s component-based, scalable, logical architecture (CSLA .NET), an object-oriented framework that acts as the foundation for a range of enterprise applications which you are free to examine, use and modify.

Editorial Reviews

About the Author

Rockford Lhotka is the author of numerous books, including Expert One-on-One Visual Basic .NET and Expert C# Business Objects. He is a Microsoft Software Legend, regional director, "Most Valuable Professional", and INETA speaker. Rockford speaks at many conferences and user groups around the world and is a columnist for MSDN Online. Rockford is the principal technology evangelist for Magenic Technologies, one of the nation's premiere Microsoft Gold Certified Partners dedicated to solving today's most challenging business problems using 100% Microsoft tools and technology.

Product Details

• Paperback: 840 pages
• Publisher: Apress; 1 edition (July 6, 2004)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 1590593448
• ISBN-13: 978-1590593448
• Product Dimensions: 9.2 x 7.1 x 1.7 inches
• Shipping Weight: 3 pounds
• Average Customer Review: 3.6 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (28 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #1,493,506 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

29 of 32 people found the following review helpful:

4.0 out of 5 stars Object oriented and distributed computing framework, July 29, 2004

By 

W Boudville (Terra, Sol 3) - See all my reviews
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This review is from: Expert C# Business Objects (Books for Professionals by Professionals) (Paperback)

For large programming projects, an object oriented approach is now widely acknowledged as superior to an earlier procedural methodology. On a separate front, for reasons like scalability and fault tolerance, a project might be implemented across different machines, in a distributed computing layout.

As Lhotka explains, there are often times when it would be desirable to combine the two approaches. He lays out a multitier logical structure for a web application. Data is passed back and forth across the layers. A common problem is to validate the data according to some business logic. Traditionally, this might have been done at several layers, leading to code duplication and maintenance problems. Or, if it was implemented in only one layer, feedback about invalid data might be slow. An OO person would say, obviously, that you should wrap the data in an object that implements the business rules.

But passing this object between layers on different machines is not simple, to put it mildly. Lhotka offers us a framework that sits atop .NET to make this possible. He had an earlier version running under COM. But he shows how .NET is a far more powerful environment in which to redo the framework.

He gives us an elegant approach to mixing object oriented and distributed computing under .NET. So much so that you might wonder why Microsoft did not already build this out.

17 of 18 people found the following review helpful:

3.0 out of 5 stars Some good ideas in the book, but only for a certain type of application and subsequent design, July 19, 2006

By 

Joseph Reddy (St. Louis, MO United States) - See all my reviews
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This review is from: Expert C# 2005 Business Objects (Expert's Voice in .NET) (Paperback)

Truly, I think this book is an introduction to Mr. Lhotka's CSLA Framework, and not a text for designing expert business objects. Discovering and designing business objects for an application are tough exercises that are not covered in much detail here.

There are applications that can benefit from the type of design suggested in the book and the CSLA framework, but in the realm of business applications I think they are few and far between. If you want to build an application that essentially pulls records from a database, lets the user view or change that data and return it to the database, then this book offers a very straightforward way to build these types of applications. However it is easy for a developer to believe that this type of design can be applied to every application they face. (When you have a hammer, everything looks like a nail.) Often, I think the result is an application highly coupled to the implementation of storage, with quasi-business objects that have complexity above and beyond their true business complexity, no core system that can be cleanly modeled and understood by non-technical team members, and a user interface that is often no more than just a front-end to a database. Again, I think the CSLA framework promotes this kind of design; it does not enforce it or stop you from building a more solid design.

The book is well written and is not too difficult to follow the concepts offered. This is why I give it 3 stars and not less. However I have to warn the newer developer who is looking for guidance in building OO designed applications in an effort to manage the difficulties of the more complex business applications they are starting to deal with. I don't think this book addresses this need. I would suggest Object-Oriented Design Heuristics by Arthur J. Riel or maybe Object-Oriented Analysis and Design with Applications (3rd Edition) by Grady Booch.

I have written a much more comprehensive review on my website. Click on my Amazon Real Name(TM) above to view my profile and web page link.

17 of 19 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Not the Holy Grail, but very good, December 1, 2005

By 

David C. Veeneman (Southern California) - See all my reviews
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This review is from: Expert C# Business Objects (Books for Professionals by Professionals) (Paperback)

First: This book is not "N-Tier for Dummies". It's pretty heavy going. To get value from it, the reader should be pretty familiar with .NET and with object-oriented programming.

The book provides a complete walk-through of application design, using a framework ('CSLA') that provides most of the basic infrastructure needed for a scalable, maintainable application. The framework isn't simple, and one really needs to understand how it works to use it effectively. That takes some time, but for me, it has been time well spent.

This book (and the CSLA framework) provides three important benefits: First, it is a great way to learn application design, from beginning to end. Second, the CSLA framework frees the designer to focus on the business objects that do the work of the applications, without getting bogged down in a lot of low-level infrastructure. And finally, it presents a fully-documented and widely-used application architecture. It's easier to hire and train developers for an application based on the CSLA framework, which has been around for about ten years.

This book probably won't help developers who write simple database front-ends. It's overkill. But I would recommend it to anyone who designs or develops applications that do more than collect user input and display query results.