a good introduction
Excerpt from C# Online.NET Review (wiki.CSharp-Online.NET):
"The author is quite well known in parts of the Microsoft realms. He is many times an author, a trainer, a speaker, and a developer. He is a good communicator--writing simply about a wide range of distributed application types, problems, and solutions. Often, he gives us sufficient detail to illustrate the case without resorting to tutorial-style, step-by-step instructions."
strong declarative programming
Nagel takes us on a guided tour of what .NET has to offer the programmer. The book shows the advantages of .NET over the earlier COM approach to writing distributed code in a Microsoft environment. A key advantage being that under COM, your components had to be registered with the Registry. Whereas under .NET, this is totally unnecessary. Very nice. Interacting with the Registry has been a perennial sore point for some programmers. So under .NET, your components are, in this sense, more encapsulated and hence easier to maintain.
The virtues of writing a multitier application are explained. This is where you factor your code into 3 parts - UI, business logic and database server. (Or even more parts, depending on your circumstances.) How to do this in .NET takes up the bulk of the book. For example, the UI code shows how you might use ASP.NET to help build those components. While connecting to a database server can involve the use of ADO.NET.
The subtitle of the book refers to business solutions. An important consequence is the need for atomic transactions when using a database. So an entire chapter is devoted to showing how .NET enables this.
An important strength of .NET that emerges from the book is that it lets you do a lot of declarative programming, instead of procedural programming, to invoke components with useful functionality. The declarative effort is done by changing attributes in the XML metadata describing a component. Often, this is easier than writing a desired function by hand, and more robust against bugs.
Microsoft MVP 2005 - Visual C# recommended
Creating distributed applications in .NET is such a huge topic to try and cover in roughly 500 pages. You've got so many options based on who will use your .NET application and over what type of network connection/firewall configuration(s) they'll be using.
I'd have probably given this book 5 stars if it had just a little bit more detail on some of the lesser known challenges with creating distributed applications.
That said, Christian (author) does a great job of clearly communicating the complexities of creating a wide variety of distributed application types. Plenty of source samples to more than get you started on your way. I found his writing style easy to follow and the discussions quite relevant to the types of complex distributed software families I'm building today.
Covers a lot of ground
I'm impressed with this book. It's hefty 500 pages covers a wide range of topics at a level that should work for most intermediate to advanced engineers. The author doesn't go into obsessive details or the step by step explanations so often seen in books on Microsoft technologies. Instead, the author treats us like we have brains. Thank you.
Secure SOAP services, networking, transactions, concurrency, security and more are all covered in an effective and thorough manner. Bravo.
