Expert C# 2005 Business Objects (Expert's Voice in .NET) [Paperback]

Rockford Lhotka (Author)

Book Description

ISBN-10: 1590596323 | ISBN-13: 978-1590596326 | Publication Date: March 21, 2006 | Edition: 2nd ed. 2006. Corr. 2nd printing

When Rocky first presented his incredibly significant CSLA.NET architecture and framework, he helped trigger a sea-change in the mindset of VB enterprise developers that is still at work today. His depth of thinking now influences developers across the language boundaries, and the previous editions of the books were bestsellers.

Deep Q&A sessions spark up every time Rocky speaks; it seems that an entire generation of professional .NET programmers are employing Rocky's ideas in their critical work. Rocky has thought through the enterprise problem space deeply, and he is a modern master at answering the practical questions.

On Wiley acquisition editor Jim Minatel’s blog, he gives his opinion of the commercial potential of the book: "Shoudln't be a surprise that Rocky is working on revisions of his Business Objects books. Man do I wish these were Wrox books. That's not some great secret either, right? Yes, out of the 30-something best-selling books we bought we missed the potential for Rocky's then-unpublished book. I'd still say we were 90% or better successful in picking the right books. But I'll reiterate, man I wish these were ours."

Editorial Reviews

About the Author

Rockford Lhotka is the author of several books, including the Expert Visual Basic .NET and C# Business Objects books. He is a Microsoft Software Legend, Regional Director, MVP and INETA speaker. He is a columnist for MSDN Online and contributing author for Visual Studio Magazine, and he regularly presents at major conferences around the world - including Microsoft PDC, Tech Ed, VS Live! and VS Connections. Rockford is the Principal Technology Evangelist for Magenic Technologies (www.magenic.com), a company focused on delivering business value through applied technology and one of the nation's premiere Microsoft Gold Certified Partners. For more information go to www.lhotka.net.

Product Details

• Paperback: 696 pages
• Publisher: Apress; 2nd ed. 2006. Corr. 2nd printing edition (March 21, 2006)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 1590596323
• ISBN-13: 978-1590596326
• Product Dimensions: 8.9 x 6.8 x 1.4 inches
• Shipping Weight: 2.7 pounds (View shipping rates and policies)
• Average Customer Review: 3.6 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (28 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #1,010,056 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.