Customer Reviews

Programming Microsoft ADO.NET 2.0 Applications: Advanced Topics

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

 

 

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!

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.

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.

I finally found an ADO.NET book that gave an example of how to perform conflict resolution that is useable. This book quickly cover the objects in ADO.NET, but then goes much further by applying covering topics that are new in ADO.NET 2.0 as well as topics that not new to ADO.NET 2.0, but are never covered in other books.
Pablo Castro wrote the forward for this book, and I agree with everything that he said about this book.

This book does delve deep into the plumbing of ADO.Net 2.0, but I must admit that when I read the "Advanced Topics" part of the title, I thought that it would actually cover more complicated versions of some scenarios that might be found in "beginners" ADO.Net books such as handling many-to-many data relationships with bound controls and possibly designing and building a data access layer. While data access layers were covered to some degree, the described methods involved intensive interaction with SQL Server system tables - something I don't tend to make a practice of.

The information in the book is good, just not what I was hoping to find.

Here it is. It's an ok book. But I have to agree with one of the previous post about the GUId Keys. I also found that the grid topics were not need it as well as the overview (the first two chapters.) If is advanced, I'm assuming the reader knows that or has another book.
I think that saving 4 to 6 chapters that were not need it, they could have extended the book to be far more advanced and concentrate in transactions, SQLCLR and so on.

This book is more of a reference to the advanced parts of ADO.NET. The book is well written. The content covers the material very well. The book can be read from cover to cover, or, can be used as a reference by finding the material needed. It is very well thought out and written in a manner that is easy to understand, provided you understand the material prerequsites.

This is a very good book, well written, the author has a clean style that I enjoyed very much. All topics are extensively covered with small but very useful examples. No pages of code: Just what is needed.
I give 4 stars only because it lacks explaining some in depth argument such as subclassing datasets or typed datatables. I expect a new edition with add-ins that will cover those new topics.

This is excellent book, Author have amazing writing style, very well organized , examples are very good to show what he is talking about, Really Professional, I will look forward to any new books for Mr. Glenn in the future. On .NET

Great book for ado.net. I wish this book has covered "how to use new features of ado.net with business layer. There should be some more chapter(s) for data acesss layer utilizing ado.net.