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20 of 21 people found the following review helpful:
2.0 out of 5 stars
Not what I had hoped for..., August 2, 2007
This review is from: Programming Microsoft Composite UI Application Block and Smart Client Software Factory (Pro-Best Practices) (Paperback)
Holly smokes!!!! I have never owned such a thin book with so much white space on the 199 pages that are there. I would estimate removing all the white space would bring this book down to about 120 to 150 pages.
This book does not do what I had hoped for. I posted in my blog that I was hoping for insight that did not already exist, and that is not the case. This book is a high level overview of the CAB and SCSF. The material that is there is good. The problem is there just isn't very much material, and what is there is not in depth.
I was nervous about the description of the book because it described the book as a learning workshop style of writing, but ordered it because it was written by David S. Platt. He has written some good books in the past.
I gave this book 2 stars out of 5 because if you don't want to weed through all the help documentation on the CAB and the SCSF, this book will give you a nice overview of what is available. But to get down and dirty you will need to refer to the help documentation.
This book should have been a free download labeled "CAB and the SCSF Hands on Lab".
Of course they would have to complete the code samples, which currently are labeled under construction on the author's book download site.
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8 of 8 people found the following review helpful:
2.0 out of 5 stars
An unfortunate essential, August 30, 2007
This review is from: Programming Microsoft Composite UI Application Block and Smart Client Software Factory (Pro-Best Practices) (Paperback)
It irks me to say it but this book is essential.
I must quickly add that this book is also an incredible disappointment. The other reviewers in this space are 100% correct and justifiably outraged. You will not learn much at all about programming CAB. This book deserves no better than 2 stars; it deserves zero stars.
However, the fact remains that there is no other CAB book. It is a breezy read, passably accurate (as far as it goes), and there simply is no other orientation to CAB/SCSF as good as this one.
Damn faint praise. But be honest: the CAB/SCSF help files are awful, Mario Szpuszta's white paper is a free, wonderful tutorial - but it doesn't cover the core components, and the Wiki + web-based commentary are a grab bag of point topics that presuppose general CAB knowledge.
The discussion board is full of remarks like "Hi - I'm a novice and I've read all the help, and done all the labs, yet I can't make any sense of CAB. Can someone help me?" Well, Platt is for those folks. We who think CAB is fundamentally good architecture must be grateful to anyone who can make it approachable and intelligible. Platt succeeds in doing that much.
Sure, Platt seems to have phoned this one in - the pages look like slightly warmed over copies of his lecture notes - and he could have delivered this .. this .. this pamphlet .. a year ago - but it is (sigh) still the best orientation available.
Therefore, I have to urge anyone who is considering CAB or learning CAB to buy this book. It won't be the worst $25 you ever spent.
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7 of 7 people found the following review helpful:
2.0 out of 5 stars
Disappointing, August 25, 2007
This review is from: Programming Microsoft Composite UI Application Block and Smart Client Software Factory (Pro-Best Practices) (Paperback)
I was looking forward to this book being published as there really isn't very much documentation available for either the Composite UI Application Block or the Smart Client Software Factory. Microsoft's own documentation is quite weak, and to use these technologies you find yourself repeatedly referring to the code itself or community blogs and websites.
However I have to say Platt's book isn't the answer to these problems. Firstly it's very short. It's true that there are nearly 200 pages, but there's a lot of white space, big diagrams and padding throughout the book. The CAB/SCSF is now quite a large and complex piece of software and inevitably Platt can only skim the surface of the technology in such a short book.
Secondly Platt makes no real attempt to explain some of the core concepts behind the CAB/SCSF. For example, the CAB uses dependency injection and DI containers heavily, and many Microsoft developers will not have met these concepts before. Platt makes no real attempt to explain what these things are and why we might want to use them in a smart client application. This is also a criticism that can be levelled at the Microsoft documentation. Platt is better on why we might use the CAB to achieve loose coupling between parts (`modules') of a smart client application. But in general developers coming to the CAB struggle with the concepts more than the code and Platt has focused heavily on the code.
Thirdly Platt is quite selective on which parts of the framework he covers. For example there is a chapter on the Action Catalog, which is quite an esoteric part of the SCSF technology. However there's no real discussion of WorkItem State, which is a much more core concept and causes a lot of confusion. The Action Catalog is just one of several new services in the latest SCSF, and Platt doesn't discuss the others in the same detail (e.g. WorkspaceLocator, EntityTranslator).
On the plus side the book is an easy read, and it does have a strong introduction where in 30-odd pages Platt gives a good initial overview of the subject. On the subjects he does cover Platt is factually accurate and informative. Having read the book I do feel I have a better understanding of how the technology works.
In the absence of any real alternative, and given that it is quite cheap, this book is worth purchasing for a quick read to give you a selective overview of the subject. Hence I've given it two stars. But it is too short and unfortunately it's far from being the definitive guide I was hoping for.
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