- ISBN13: 9781590596326
- Condition: NEW
- Notes: Brand New from Publisher. No Remainder Mark.
Product Description
Rockford Lhotka started writing his Business Objects books in 1996, and over the years, hes become one of the worlds foremost authorities on building distributed object-oriented systems. His industry-standard VB . NET Business Objects book not only addresses changes in . NET 2. 0 and Visual Studio 2005, but also reflects substantial enhancements and improvements to the CSLA . NET Framework and how it can be used to create enterprise-level . NET applications. Expert C# Business Objects is for developers who want to see Lhotkas ideas applied in the C# idiom. The book takes you from an opening discussion of logical architectures to detailed n-tier deployment options using the CSLA . NET Framework. The depth of Rockfords thinking now influences developers across language boundaries. With this book, you can learn directly from the expert whose framework has become universally accepted and respected. . . . More >>
For large programming projects, an object oriented approach is now widely acknowledged as superior to an earlier procedural methodology. On a separate front, for reasons like scalability and fault tolerance, a project might be implemented across different machines, in a distributed computing layout.
As Lhotka explains, there are often times when it would be desirable to combine the two approaches. He lays out a multitier logical structure for a web application. Data is passed back and forth across the layers. A common problem is to validate the data according to some business logic. Traditionally, this might have been done at several layers, leading to code duplication and maintenance problems. Or, if it was implemented in only one layer, feedback about invalid data might be slow. An OO person would say, obviously, that you should wrap the data in an object that implements the business rules.
But passing this object between layers on different machines is not simple, to put it mildly. Lhotka offers us a framework that sits atop . NET to make this possible. He had an earlier version running under COM. But he shows how . NET is a far more powerful environment in which to redo the framework.
He gives us an elegant approach to mixing object oriented and distributed computing under . NET. So much so that you might wonder why Microsoft did not already build this out.
Rating: 4 / 5
Truly, I think this book is an introduction to Mr. Lhotka’s CSLA Framework, and not a text for designing expert business objects. Discovering and designing business objects for an application are tough exercises that are not covered in much detail here.
There are applications that can benefit from the type of design suggested in the book and the CSLA framework, but in the realm of business applications I think they are few and far between. If you want to build an application that essentially pulls records from a database, lets the user view or change that data and return it to the database, then this book offers a very straightforward way to build these types of applications. However it is easy for a developer to believe that this type of design can be applied to every application they face. (When you have a hammer, everything looks like a nail. ) Often, I think the result is an application highly coupled to the implementation of storage, with quasi-business objects that have complexity above and beyond their true business complexity, no core system that can be cleanly modeled and understood by non-technical team members, and a user interface that is often no more than just a front-end to a database. Again, I think the CSLA framework promotes this kind of design; it does not enforce it or stop you from building a more solid design.
The book is well written and is not too difficult to follow the concepts offered. This is why I give it 3 stars and not less. However I have to warn the newer developer who is looking for guidance in building OO designed applications in an effort to manage the difficulties of the more complex business applications they are starting to deal with. I don’t think this book addresses this need. I would suggest Object-Oriented Design Heuristics by Arthur J. Riel or maybe Object-Oriented Analysis and Design with Applications (3rd Edition) by Grady Booch.
I have written a much more comprehensive review on my website. Click on my Amazon Real Name(TM) above to view my profile and web page link.
Rating: 3 / 5
First: This book is not “N-Tier for Dummies”. It’s pretty heavy going. To get value from it, the reader should be pretty familiar with . NET and with object-oriented programming.
The book provides a complete walk-through of application design, using a framework (‘CSLA’) that provides most of the basic infrastructure needed for a scalable, maintainable application. The framework isn’t simple, and one really needs to understand how it works to use it effectively. That takes some time, but for me, it has been time well spent.
This book (and the CSLA framework) provides three important benefits: First, it is a great way to learn application design, from beginning to end. Second, the CSLA framework frees the designer to focus on the business objects that do the work of the applications, without getting bogged down in a lot of low-level infrastructure. And finally, it presents a fully-documented and widely-used application architecture. It’s easier to hire and train developers for an application based on the CSLA framework, which has been around for about ten years.
This book probably won’t help developers who write simple database front-ends. It’s overkill. But I would recommend it to anyone who designs or develops applications that do more than collect user input and display query results.
Rating: 5 / 5
I entered the world of OO programming by struggling through Lhotka’s Visual Basic 6. 0 Business Objects. It was eye opening to work with a full application framework that was clearly over my head. By working through his application time and again, I truly learned an immense amount, above and beyond what I would have learned otherwise. So, I enthusiastically purchased this book, expecting no less. Lhotka does not disappoint. I have learned a great deal more than I knew about C# while implementing the framework. Beyond that, the framework itself sovles multiple production level problems. This book is fantastic.
Rating: 5 / 5
This is a huge book that covers a large swatch of business object material for . NET. It’s unusual because I would expect to see this type of material for Java. It starts with a technology overview of the web and related technologies. It then goes into Object Oriented Analysis and Design. And finishes off with the implementation of these architectural concepts on the . NET platform. About a third of the book is spent in each area.
I found the overall content wasn’t particularly tight and focused, which adds to the books size, which is large for an architectural book. That being said there are a lot of good ideas and the content is well organized. If you are an architect looking to migrate to the . NET platform you should have a look at this book.
Rating: 4 / 5