Great book for enterprise application.
This book covered material for those people work in enterprise level enviornments who are concern about their servers and wanted to keep their servers running 24X7.
This is a book for those professional want to enhance their professional skills and work in distributed system environment (Clustered Servers).
This book give you a good guidance to design great applications in simple readable manner. It covered areas such as Client Tier, Application Tier, Web Tier, and Data Tier. It shows how the .Net Service inter-related and gives you an overview of the .Net framework architect.
The book give you better understand of where .Net is heading and how to organize your programming structure along with your server configuration etc.,
Not for beginners!
Actually, this book a great book for beginners.
But, it is a *must* read for Microsoft Solutions Architects and Senior Software Engineers.
However, I recommend that you read Martin Fowler's (et al) book "Patterns of Enterprise Application Architecture", before you read this one. And the book "Design Patterns - Elements of Reusable OO Software" before either of the above.
I know, you have to deal with enough dependancies while coding, you don't want someone you don't know telling you there are dependancies for reading a book. I practice "tough love". Deal with it. ;)
Complex Patterns simply explained
If you have been programming for a few years, you would have used a few patterns without even knowing it. Encapsulating rules into a class is a classic one - also called the command pattern. But, describing the concept in a common way is what makes communication easier among the community. Patterns are documented approaches to solving common problems in software design. Microsoft's Enterprise Solution patterns Using Microsoft .Net: Version 2.0 comes off with a great deal of success in explaining the various patterns in a simple and lucid way.
If you use .Net languages for designing software, this book is pretty much a must in your library. Many pattern books so far (even the Gang of four book as well as the classic one by Martin Fowler) have been primarily in other languages AND a bit esoteric/abstract; thus they don't come close to being very useful right out-off-the-book if you are a .Net developer. Using .Net technologies make the sample easier to understand i.e., if you use ASP.Net and C#, the examples have a greater appeal.
The patterns are grouped as a cluster of related patterns. I like the fact that the patterns presented are progressively better at solving a problem. The web presentation patterns section is an example. The examples themselves are easy to understand i.e., if you are familiar to the .Net programming space, unlike the Gang of Four book which had non-business application samples. I also recommend the `Do Factory' set of examples for understanding and applying various patterns.
Don't get confused by the 2.0 in the title which refers to the version of the book rather than usage of .Net 2.0 for the samples (which by the way isn't an issue at all). If you are at a point where you want to understand what patterns are and/or understand more of them, this book is a great starting point mostly for the simplicity of presentation and clear examples.
If you're interested how design patterns are implemented
I bought this book since I wanted to know not only what design patterns are feasible on the .NET framework, but how to implement it.
This book takes a text book approach to discussing the pros and cons of a particular design to solve a recurring problem in application design.
This book assumes you have some enterprise application experience and are familiar with the .NET framework. This is an patterns book that is applicable to .NET.
Since I'm a developer, the items of most interest to me were chapter 3, discussing web presentation designs: MVC (implemented in 3 ways), Page Controller, and Front Controller.
What I didn't like was the way that the example in the Front Controller didn't have the capability to dynamically specify which view was to be the target page following a command object execution.
Although the sequence diagrams were very good in helping understanding the concepts of web design patterns; I felt that they should have used more diagrams in the later chapters.
Other than that, I found the book to have sufficient enough information that I needed to know to buy it when I came across it at Borders.
good introduction - poor examples
The book provides a good starting point to learn Microsoft .NET, especially if you would like to implement applications using patterns approach. However the book does give you a feeling of good read that it was hurried, and the examples really does not adress the challenges you will face in real .NET projects. I should've picked up the electronic version of the book available free at Microsoft rather than buying this book.
(12 reviews)
