ASP.NET 3.5 Enterprise Application Development with Visual Studio 2008

Customer Reviews

• Great for Beginners, Otherwise Disappointing  May 13, 2009 (25 of 26 found this helpful)

  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 chap

• ASP.NET 3.5 Demystified  Mar 12, 2009 (2 of 2 found this helpful)

  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!!!
  

• Still Waiting for ASP.NET 3.5 Problem - Design - Solution?  Apr 27, 2009 (2 of 3 found this helpful)

  For those who've been waiting for ASP.NET 3.5 Website Programming: Problem - Design - Solution to arrive, wait no further -- there's a great ASP.NET 3.5 P-D-S book on the shelves right now, and this is it.
  
  This book faithfully follows the very popular Wrox "Problem - Design - Solution" format, evolving chapter by chapter while analyzing business requirements, examining various design scenarios, and implementing a beginning-to-end solution in a reusable framework. The book uses LINQ to SQL for data access (though you could easily adapt this to Entity Framework or your third-party ORM of choice), and unlike the BeerHouse books, the emphasis is more on developing line-of-business applications. It covers a lot of important material the 3.5 BeerHouse book won't go into, such as workflow, notification, reporting, and auditing. It also incorporates a number of current architectural trends, such as dynamic querying, code generation, and so on.
  
  For those not familiar with author Vince Varallo, you are in for a treat. His writing style is clear, concise, and easy to follow. Explanations are well-detailed and are liberally augmented by code samples.
  
  Still waiting for your BeerHouse fix? I urge you to give ASP.NET 3.5 Enterprise Application Development with Visual Studio 2008 Problem - Design - Solution a shot. All in all, a very highly recommended read.

• Great book, Great sample code  Mar 17, 2009 (2 of 3 found this helpful)

  I purchased this book with high hopes as I'm currently developing an enterprise wide n-tiered ASP.NET 3.5 solution. It definitely delivered! This book allowed me to hit the ground running with my new application. The author did a great job with the code sample presentations....they are very clear and well organized. I especially found the LINQ code to be useful. I highly recommend this book if you're serious about using ASP.NET 3.5 for an enterprise level web application.

• Easy to Learn .NET 3.5  Mar 6, 2009 

  Last month I bought this book. I found it easy to learn!!
  
  This book is clear and well organized. Author show his opinion on best practices. I found those practices are the best so far.
  
  It guides you how to create 3-tier on ASP.NET 3.5 using .NET 3.5. This book is very strong on using LINQ, WF, WebPart, and ASP.NET. Also you will find interesting topics on enterprise application like Role-Based Access Control, Dashboard, Notification and Reporting System, and auditing data.
  
  Good Book! I wrote this because I found this book is very easy to learn and no one reviewed this book. So let me be the first.