Programming Microsoft ADO.NET 2.0 Applications: Advanced Topics [Paperback]

Glenn Johnson (Author)

Book Description

ISBN-10: 0735621411 | ISBN-13: 978-0735621411 | Publication Date: November 30, 2005 | Edition: 2005 ed.

Dive in for reference where you need it—and learn the intricacies of developing sleeker, more robust, security-enhanced applications in ADO.NET 2.0. Featuring code samples in Microsoft Visual C# and Visual Basic, this reference goes beyond the fundamentals to help professional developers solve sophisticated enterprise development problems.

Discover how to:

• Examine advanced connectivity options and best practices—including connection pooling, clustered connections, and asynchronous access
• Use tracing to diagnose application flow and performance issues
• Resolve concurrency conflicts and implement a data access layer
• Implement seamless application failover from one Microsoft SQL Server database to another
• Use managed code and the SQLCLR to create stored procedures, user-defined functions and types, aggregates, and triggers
• Write effective data-caching code to improve application performance
• Use the Systems.Transactions namespace to work with Microsoft SQL Server 2005
• Implement streaming techniques to “chunk” data
• Apply various methods to extract and modify XML data

PLUS—Get code samples on the Web

Editorial Reviews

From the Publisher

This reference delves into more than a dozen beyond-the-basics topics that are not thoroughly explored in other books on ADO.NET 2.0, providing the guidance needed to help master advanced features.

Key Book Benefits:

• Covers advanced topics—including using ObjectSpaces, the DataView control, and security issues—not explored at length or in-depth in most other ADO.NET references

• Provides reference information as well as hands-on code explorations of complex ADO.NET topics

• Features extensive code examples on a companion Web site

About the Author

Glenn Johnson is a professional trainer whose experience spans the years from COBOL and assembly language to Novell and Microsoft .NET. Formerly the director of information technologies and technical support for Tyco International, Johnson now runs his own training, consulting, and development business. He has developed courseware and taught classes worldwide on Microsoft ASP.NET, ADO.NET, C#, and .NET internals.

Product Details

• Paperback: 512 pages
• Publisher: Microsoft Press; 2005 ed. edition (November 30, 2005)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0735621411
• ISBN-13: 978-0735621411
• Product Dimensions: 9 x 7.4 x 1.3 inches
• Shipping Weight: 2.3 pounds (View shipping rates and policies)
• Average Customer Review: 4.3 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (10 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #1,073,902 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

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Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

30 of 31 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Great Examples! In VB.NET and C#, November 15, 2005

By 

John Rogers - See all my reviews

This review is from: Programming Microsoft ADO.NET 2.0 Applications: Advanced Topics (Paperback)

I just got this book, and I haven't been able to put it down. I have a little experience with ADO.NET in VS2003, but I wanted to quickly get up to speed with ADO.NET 2.0 in VS2005.
The first thing that I found was that the examples were done in both VB.NET and C# so there is no need to think about converting between languages.
Next, I found that the first chapters provide a good overview of the ADO.NET objects, so you can can familiar with the object rather quickly.
After that, the chapters focus on specific topics, (mostly new ADO.NET 2.0 topics) going into detail and giving specific implementation examples.
I like this author's style, obviously this author is also an instructor. I hope to see more books from this author!

30 of 32 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Great Resource, April 8, 2006

By 

James de la Bastide (New York) - See all my reviews
(REAL NAME)   

This review is from: Programming Microsoft ADO.NET 2.0 Applications: Advanced Topics (Paperback)

This is a nice concise book (for a programming book anyway) for ADO.NET 2.0. The book delves deep into ADO.NET 2.0 in a very clear manner. It answered many questions about how ADO.NET works that seem to have eluded me over the years. While the title is Advanced Topics, if you have developed with .NET 1.x this book will pose no problems for you. As a matter of fact I think this book will trump the Core Reference (due in July) of ADO.NET for experienced developers.

First the book dives right into ADO.NET Disconnected classes (the ones we use more Microsoft!) It gives a detailed discussion of the DataTable and DataSet, setting up relations, etc. Then it does the same for Connected ADO.NET classes. This is the general format of the book, discuss one then the same topics with the other. This makes it easier to see the differences in functionality between the disconnected and connected classes.

From there the book only gets better. It gives reasons and examples of working with ADO.NET. It goes over transactions, how to deal with concurrency, and some best practices. This book also includes a chapter on working with the new SQLCLR. It gives the pros and cons of SQLCLR and a good idea when to use it. The chapter on XML Data was of interest to me (probably because of a recent project where SQL Server 2005 and XML would have saved me a ton of heartache) and is a good read for anyone who may have a complex application that requires storage of xml data.

I highly reccomend this book for anyone working ADO.NET. A note that may also be of interest is the fact that the author tries to take advantage of SQL Server 2005 Express Edition where it can be used (which is a good majority). So if you don't have access to a full version of SQL Server 2005 this book does not exclude you.

34 of 37 people found the following review helpful:

4.0 out of 5 stars Good not Great..., July 16, 2006

By 

Shawn Wildermuth "The ADO Guy" (Atlanta, GA USA) - See all my reviews

This review is from: Programming Microsoft ADO.NET 2.0 Applications: Advanced Topics (Paperback)

Glenn Johnson has a very good book here on ADO.NET 2.0. Unfortunately, it just good not great. Here are my pros and cons:

Pros:

1. Well written and thought out.
2. Excellent coverage of ADO.NET Trace Logging.
3. Coverage of LOBs/BLOBs/CLOBs is very well thought out.
4. Discussion of Connection Pooling is very good.
5. Coverage of writting your own classes that work with System.Transactions is invalulable.

Cons:

1. Too many basic topics covered for an "Advanced Topics" book.
2. ASP.NET GridView/WinForms GridView chapters are unnecessary and incomplete.
3. Code examples are terse and somewhat unreadable (no blank lines).
4. Some information inaccurate (e.g. Suggestion of using Database Mirroring in SQL Server 2005 which was dropped as a supported feature.)
5. SQL Server Specific...lackluster Oracle, ODBC, OleDb coverage.
6. Data Caching only discusses caching with SqlDependencyCache. There are a myriad of caching options, and this is only one of them.

While not really a problem with the book, I disagree with the author in a number of assertions:

- He pushes the idea of GUIDs as keys, but never discusses the index fragmentation issue with GUIDs as keys.
- His discussion of SQLCLR doesn't warn the users enough (I know "enough" is a subjective phrase) that they shouldn't write all their code in SQLCLR.
- Mentions that "The 8,000-byte limit is much higher than you should ever need." when discussing SQLCLR User Defined Types. -- I disagree since a single object might not reach that, but a shallow object graph will reach 8K very easily.
- No comparison between SQLCLR UDT's and XML Typed XML.
- Using XML in SQL Server is touted instead of disuaded. More often than not, storing your XML in SQL Server just to have it there (or without dissecting it into relational data) will just hurt performance and raise the complexity of a system.

I gave the book a four out of five starts on Amazon.com because I think it will be a valuable resource for most developers. But it is not a perfect book.