ASP.NET 3.5 Enterprise Application Development with Visual Studio 2008: Problem Design Solution (Wrox Programmer to Programmer) (Paperback)

~ Vincent Varallo (Author)
Key Phrases: code generator, web form, manage styles, Visual Studio, The Workflow Engine, The User Interface Layer (more...)

Editorial Reviews

Product Description

Aimed at enterprise developers who use Visual Studio 2008, ASP.NET, C#, and SQL Server to deliver business applications, this book focuses on implementing patterns that can be used for real-world solutions. Each chapter establishes a problem, examines which solution will provide the best results, and then demonstrates how to go about executing that solution. The experienced author addresses building a framework for corporate intranet apps, designing the data access layer, implementing the Microsoft exception handling app block, customizing view and reports with Query Builder Control, installing the application, and much more.

From the Back Cover

ASP.NET 3.5 Enterprise Application Development with Visual Studio® 2008

If you are faced with the many challenges that come with delivering business applications, experienced author and ASP.NET expert Vince Varallo is here to help. He arms you with the necessary tools for developing ASP.NET applications with Visual Studio 2008 that are elegant, easy to maintain, and can be extended to create solutions for particular problems.

Putting Wrox's popular Problem – Design – Solution format into practice, each chapter features an individual scenario and provides a description of the problem to be addressed, the design considerations for choosing a solution, and the solution that ultimately gets to the bottom of the problem. As Varallo walks you through the solutions, each of the business requirements are examined, while the latest enhancements in ASP.NET 3.5 and Visual Studio 2008 are used so that you can implement them in a reusable framework. Packed with code samples, this hands-on guide will provide you with a foundation that you can extend to meet the specific business needs of your organization.

What you will learn from this book

• New features in the .NET Framework 3.5 such as lambda expressions, extension methods, partial methods, LINQ, and ASP.NET Ajax controls

• Design patterns for using LINQ to SQL in the data access layer

• Best practices for using patterns for data entry, auditing, workflow, and event notification

• How to develop and customize server side controls

• How to create a dashboard using the ASP.NET web part controls

• Implement the Microsoft Exception Handling App Block

Who this book is for

This book is for developers and system architects who are responsible for designing or developing enterprise-wide applications, departmental applications, portals, or any form of business application. Experience with Visual Studio, the .NET Framework, ASP.NET, and C# is helpful but not required.

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Product Details

• Paperback: 504 pages
• Publisher: Wrox (February 3, 2009)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0470396865
• ISBN-13: 978-0470396865
• Product Dimensions: 9.2 x 7.4 x 1.1 inches
• Shipping Weight: 1.7 pounds (View shipping rates and policies)
• Average Customer Review: 4.3 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (7 customer reviews)
• Amazon.com Sales Rank: #103,385 in Books (See Bestsellers in Books)

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Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

24 of 25 people found the following review helpful:

2.0 out of 5 stars Great for Beginners, Otherwise Disappointing, May 13, 2009

By	Travis Illig "Software Engineer" (Portland, OR United States) - See all my reviews (REAL NAME)

I read through this book thinking, with a title like "ASP.NET 3.5 Enterprise Application Development with Visual Studio 2008," that it would take me through creating an enterprise-class application, complete with all of the things one would think are a part of such an app. As it turns out, I think the title should be something more like "Introduction to N-Tier Development in ASP.NET."

Each chapter is set up in the same format, and it's a decent format - outline the problem, explain the design, implement the solution. The chapters are:

1) A Framework for Enterprise Applications
2) The Data Access Layer
3) Designing the Business Logic Layer
4) The User Interface Layer
5) Exception Handling
6) Role-Based Security
7) The Workflow Engine
8) Notifications
9) Reporting
10) The Query Builder Control
11) The Dashboard
12) Auditing
13) Code Generator

If you go in never having built a multi-tier app where you separate your data access from your business logic and your UI, this is a good intro to that. The explanation of the separation and showing how to keep those things separated is a good education for the ASP.NET developer who has only ever just thrown a DataSource on a page and let the controls do the work.

If you have any experience with multi-tier apps, though, the goodness, unfortunately, is not to be found. Even if you have a light amount of experience, I probably wouldn't recommend this book since it could do more damage than help. There are several reasons for this.

First, there are little things through the code that are just bad practice.

The naming conventions for everything in this book are absolutely horrible. "ENTBaseBO" is the name of the base class that all enterprise business objects derive from. The names only get worse and more unintelligible and distracting from there. When cruising through the method bodies presented you sometimes wonder if he's using Hungarian notation in C# and then you realize that it's just bad naming.

Almost every exception that gets thrown in the code is the generic System.Exception type. Even if a more specific exception type would be more appropriate, it's always a general Exception.

Rather than overriding the ToString() method on business objects, a new "GetDisplayText()" method gets added in one of the myriad base classes which gets used throughout the book when displaying the object in UI.

The data access layer uses the Microsoft Patterns and Practices Data Access Application Block, which is good... but the book urges you to use an old version of it "because it's simple to use and easy to understand" - even though the new one has many improvements over the old.

Larger things start creeping up on you once you get past the smaller stuff.

There's no localization and no mention of it. Every string seen in any UI is hardcoded somewhere in the system (not necessarily just in the UI) rather than being stored in resource files. Even if you only plan on supporting one language, it's still good practice to separate your strings from your code.

There are no tests anywhere and no mention of them. We're building an enterprise application and we're not going to test it? Really?

Rather than use standard functions built into ASP.NET like the SiteMapProvider and navigation controls that can bind to it, a lot of effort goes into writing your own site map management system and custom controls to bind to that proprietary system. Role-based security that doesn't hook into the RoleProvider.

Chapter 7, on "the workflow engine," is almost 100 pages showing you how to write a proprietary state machine workflow system. I actually had to flip back and look at the cover to make sure we were in .NET 3.5, then I got really curious as to why this wasn't a 10 page chapter showing how easy that sort of thing is to implement using Windows Workflow Foundation, which comes for free with the .NET framework.

Why is the "code generator" chapter about creating a Visual Studio wizard but has no mention of T4 or any third-party code generator? With all the code generation options out there, would I really want to roll my own using StringBuilders?

Other stuff just sits in the background and bugs at you more subconsciously. The code snippets in places are inconsistently formatted and hard to read. You start wondering why there's a little bit of logic in stored procedures and a little bit of logic in the data access layer and a little bit of logic in the business layer and whether there might have been a way to break that up in a way that would be more maintainable. No mention at all of design patterns. No mention of MVP or MVC.

Long story already too long, if you've never written an n-tier application, if you're used to just creating a single web application project that just has pages in it that were created in the Visual Studio designer and that's it... this book will give you some ideas about how to change the way you look at your application's structure and separate the logic out of the codebehind of your pages into different layers. If you have written any sort of n-tier application before, this is most likely not for you.

2 of 2 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars ASP.NET 3.5 Demystified, March 12, 2009

By	C. Huynh - See all my reviews (REAL NAME)

Read this book recently and found out how clear and concise the author explained how to build an application from beginning to end, with alot of extras also.

The author did a great job explaining the concept of building an n-tier web application and why it was import to have the separation. The reading was easy to understand and follow, as were the sample codes. Explanations of the code were very detailed, which made comprehending the code easy.

Another interesting concept the author added was the email service application that he included. It was a very "neat" way of implementing how notifications are sent out.

I would highly recommend this book to anybody looking to learn ASP.NET as well as building an enterprise level applicaton!!!

2 of 3 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars The quickest and easiest way to catch up with ASP.NET 3.5, June 15, 2009

By	Naveen Yamarthy (PA, USA) - See all my reviews (REAL NAME)

I would wholeheartedly and highly recommend this book to anyone who is serious about learning the best practices a programmer needs to build an Enterprise application using ASP.NET 3.5

It's under 500 pages, and I found it to be very easy to read and understand. The book also keeps you away from all the extraneous info which divert a reader from the current topic. The author did a good job at explaining in detail all the IMP topics in building a real world EA, discussing each topic in detail and highlighting some of the best ways of doing handling each one of those. It's not one of those too much info and boring Professor-to-Student books, but more of a interesting Lead Architect-to-Programmer book.

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