Customer Reviews

Microsoft® .NET Remoting (Pro-Developer)

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

 

 

I have mixed feelings about this book. On the one hand it excels in terms of content, tackling the more complex issues of .NET remoting including the creation of custom channel sinks; on the other hand it is severely let down by its poor presentation.

The book doesn't come with a CD, although viewing the code in its entirity is essential to understanding the issues presented in this book. Fortunately the code is available for download from the net.

The authors often fail to provide a substantial overview of the particular topics discussed in this book and present pieces of code in a piecemeal fashion which has no relevance until you reach the end of the chapter and are able to piece it all together.

This is a good book, but if you are new to the topic of .NET remoting, as I was, then prepare to dip into MSDN and spend time reviewing the code, in order to get a true understanding of this topic.

This has to be on of the poorest written books I have ever purchased.

.Net remoting is not very difficult nor confusing but my God does MS .Net remoting make it seem so.

If you want a .Net remoting book that makes sense, get Ingo Rammer's:

Advanced .Net Remoting, second ed.
ISBN: 1-59059-417-7

This book is written for .net 1.0 and the samples will not work with .net 1.1 without help from you.

You have got to be kidding. The examples are complex, not well explained, and basically the context is disjointed with no transition between subjects or chapter contents. This cannot be an introduction to Remoting, and is definitely not an intermediate introduction either. That leaves EXPERIENCED NET REMOTING Developers. Note I mentioned both "EXPERIENCED", "NET" and "REMOTING", though I doubt there would be use for those folks either. Cannot explain why this book would get ONE positive comment. I have yet to try the examples, but the way each example is explained is bizarre and confusing.

As owner of some 20 MS Press books, I'd like to congratulate the authors on doing a particularly good job with this one.

The only exposure I had previously to the Remoting part of the Framework was the little resource I could find on-line at MSDN [either way too over-the-head for a first timer, or pretty useless] and a few "tutorials" which, on the whole, had been pieced together by people who knew only a little more than me.

Having said that, it would suit someone who has some experience in Remoting, too.

I agree with a previous reviewer that it does fall into the trap, as a lot of technical books do, of displaying a code snippet, half of which is 100% in context with accompanying text and the other half of which is approximately 0% in context - only making sense once you've read a few more pages.

Will serve as an excellent reference book in months to come!

This book is not for beginners. It is very complicated, contains errors and it is not clear at certain parts. While reading the first two chapters I was very happy about the book. It goes into details about distributed applications using traditional approaches and implementing distributed applications with .NET Remoting. However, in chapter three (which is some 60 pages long) you come across many errors. The code shown is not the same as the code which you download from the Internet. I spent the entire day trying to figure out why the events raised on the server are not handled by the client. It appears that the author forgot to put an attribute on the Events class. My second objection to this book is that too much information is put into chapter 3. Author shows you how to create a .NET Remoting client and server, how to convert a server object into XML Web Services object, then how to mix server activated objects and client activated objects, then how to prevent deploying client application on the same machine as server application by creating event repeater class which does not work. Neither the book code, nor downloaded code nor readers code work. The repeater is never invoked and is never handled by the client. The last but not least is an explanation on using interfaces to prevent publishing library code on the client machine. Due to the fact that you build two clases in the examples (one of them implements interface) it is not true that you don't need to deploy server library because the other class will be useless in the client application and client application would not compile. Those with the knowledge of C# will be able to fix it by defining one more interface for other class and then activate the remote object without the server library. Chapter 4 is an explanation of SOAP and Messages and on those 20 pages half is printed with replies and responses. The other chapters are informative but not so much to deserver any praise.

This book does have some good sides, but the bad sides are incomplete code, too much information per chapter and information like SOAP response and request code which is there really to increase the number of pages. It is definitely not for beginners and you MUST have a thorough knowledge of C# in order to progress further as the entire book is based on sample from chapter 3. If you cannot solve the mysteries in chapter 3 then forget about this book.

I would really like to say more nice things about this book and to suggest it, but I realy cannot. Instead, you might want to have a look and Apress - Advanced .NET Remoting.

Having an accompanying CD speaks for itself if you are looking for examples that work. This books examples are not sufficiently detailed to get working. The jobserver example of server-activated object alludes to an approach that will never work but authors get away scot-free because they have no CD. The example suggests that a server activated remote object can expose an interface that contains an event and that clients can add (+=) their own handlers to this event. Maybe they did not mean to suggests that but I think most will agree that it sure looks like it.

The book looks great and is well organized until you start trying to implement the examples.

Much changed with remoting going from 1.0 to 1.1 and the degree of change comes close to making this book obsolete, though I have seen taht there is a 1.1 book out.

If the level of detail in a technical books examples is insufficient or if examples are incorrect then there is a real integrity issue if authors have not:
1. gotten code to work themselves
2. put working examples on CD or on a web site
3. put themselves on the line by fielding questions regarding the examples

I work with some really bright people with deep and wide experience with .Net Framework since early beta 1 and they all agree that some of the things the examples suggest are impossible and will not work.

By now I have read numerous books on .NET remoting. ".NET Remoting" by McLean, Naftel and Williams is by far the best. What I like most about it is the writing style; it is clear and concise. What's more, the writing is grammatical and at times best described as elegant. Kudos to the authors. In my opinion, this book is a "must have".

This manuscript was extremely helpful to my colleagues and me in our most recent project. For anyone dealing with a .Net initiative involving any sort of distributed, and most importantly scalable, application this guide is a must read.