Programming .NET 3.5 224
lamaditx writes "The world of the .NET framework is taken to the next level by the release of .NET 3.5. The intended audience of this book are experienced .NET programmers. There are no sections that tell you details about C#, SQL servers or anything like that. I don't recommend this book if you never worked on a .NET project and don't know how to set up a SQL database. You should be aware that the code is written in C#. You might use one of the software code converters if you prefer Visual Basic instead. I think the code is still readable even if you do not know C#. I appreciate the fact that the authors decided to use one language only because it keeps the book smaller. The authors assume you are using Visual Studio 2008. You don't necessarily need to update to 2008 if you are working with an older edition because you can use the free Express Edition to get started." Keep reading for the rest of Adrian's review.
The table of contents is available from O'Reilly — together with a chapter preview — here. The book does not come with any extras but includes the usual free 45 days access to the book on Safari.
| Programming .NET 3.5 | |
| author | Jesse Liberty & Alex Horovitz |
| pages | 476 |
| publisher | O'Reilly Media |
| rating | 7/10 |
| reviewer | Adrian Lambeck |
| ISBN | ISBN 978-0-596-52756-3 |
| summary | Covers all main .NET technologies found in .NET 3.5 |
This book covers the key technologies in .NET. There are books on each of these technologies: Windows Presentation Foundation (WPF), Windows Communication Foundation (WCF), XAML, AJAX,C# and Silverlight already, but this book shows you how everything is connected with each other. As the authors note: "Our goal is to show you the 25% that you will use 85% of the time.". From my point of view this is good because I have a .NET 2.0 background and wanted to know what is new in .NET 3.5 and how things are connected.
The book is divided in 3 main parts. The first is presentation, which covers XAML, WPF and AJAX. The second describes how to take advantage of the design pattern support in .NET. The last part covers the business layer which includes LINQ, WCF, WF and CardSpace.
The first part starts with XAML. This is the eXtensible A The next main topic is using WPF which is the successor of Windows Forms. The authors explain how to connect data structures to the user interface which I consider to be one of the most important parts of using WPF. You will also find a lot of code and XAML layout descriptions.
The chapter on Silverlight was not very helpful to me. Silverlight is the competitor of Adobe Flash. Giving samples how to layout a Silverlight application is essentially the same as a WPF application thus it dives into more details of XAML. I am missing the real Silverlight message so this part did not meet my expectations.
The third technology you will learn about is AJAX which leads us away from the desktop client to a web client. The explanation how AJAX works is pretty good. The authors show you step by step how to create a todo list web-application with a database backend using ASP.NET and AJAX. Again, this does not cover all AJAX controls or ASP.NET but it shows you how the parts are interconnected and assumes that if you know how to handle one control, then you can also figure out how to handle all the others. Most web applications need some kind of access control. At this point the authors argue that it is faster to implement your own security tables instead of using the ASP.NET forms-based controls.My opinion is that you should never do something that is not correct to teach something else. There are always people who get it wrong in a way you did not anticipate. My recommendation: use the ASP.NET components and do not implement them by yourself.
The second part about the design patterns was surprising to me because I expected the common introduction to standard design pattern. The Model-View-Controller project implements the pattern for ASP.NET and allows developers to incorporate it easily. The advantage is that you get a comprehensive and easy to understand introduction how .NET supports design pattern implementation. I guess this will lead some developers from theory of design patterns to actually implementing them.
I consider the third part to be the real interesting content. It starts with LINQ which bridges object-oriented code to relational databases. You get to know the differences to SQL and also the advantages it provides by explaining new concepts. The examples are easy to understand and successfully make their point.
Windows Communication Foundation (WCF) covers the hot Service-Oriented-Architecture (SOA) topic. The authors explain what it is all about but you will need some knowledge about Web Services and XML to really get it. The introduction is rather short but more details are explained in the corresponding example.
The chapter about Windows Workflow Foundation (WF) starts with a short example how you implement a workflow without WF. After that you get to see how you do the same with WF. This way the necessity for WF become clear and you understand how to take advantage of this technology.
Card Space is the successor of Microsoft passport which was not successful as an authentication service with respect to user acceptance. This is also the key issue that decides on the success of Card Space. Maybe the improved interoperability will help. The chapter provides you with a short authenticate-yourself test and shows you how to offer Card Space authentication in your ASP.NET application.
The book is a good entry to the world of .NET 3.5 because it gives you an idea about every part and what it is good for. Maybe you do not need all of it for your job but at least you know that it exists and how it might be useful. I think it is reasonable that a comprehensive introduction to .NET 3.5 can not satisfy everybody because the range of topics is too broad. One can argue that this kind of information could also be retrieved from the net. I consider the book to be a better resource because it already summarizes the important information such that you do not drown in a flood of information.
There is also some criticism as I pointed out earlier. Maybe I am just a little picky about the details but if you print code download references into a book, they must be available. Most examples can be downloaded but the Alex Horovitz site was not reachable when I tried to access it. Another personal remark is that I do not like to see quotes from Wikipedia. Other people might think different about that so you just need to decide on your own.
I rate this book a 7. The authors scratch the surface of every topic and choose an appropriate style to explain it. You can tell that they thought about how to explain each topic on it's own and give you not just the "how" but also the "why".
Adrian Lambeck is a graduate student in "Media and Information Technologies" and worked with .NET for a few years.
You can purchase Programming .NET 3.5 from amazon.com. Slashdot welcomes readers' book reviews -- to see your own review here, read the book review guidelines, then visit the submission page.
recommended for advanced programmers (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:Pogramming, def: (Score:5, Insightful)
You know..... (Score:5, Insightful)
It's a sad day at Slashdot when more people would comment on a typo than offer criticism about a book. So let's fix this.
It explains some of the newer things 3.5 brings but does it deal with their actual implementation with business logic or otherwise? From what I've gathered, LINQ sounds like craziness in terms of being able to keep SQL maintained.
Roll with that.
Re:recommended for advanced programmers (Score:1, Insightful)
Advanced programmers do not use C# nor .NET
So I'm a jerk, but (Score:5, Insightful)
I'm sorry, this is a really poorly written review. It's choppy, uninsightful, and just painful to read. And then there are "sentences" like:
Good lord.
I still don't change it... (Score:4, Insightful)
"Perhaps a language which changes so drastically and so quickly should be avoided. Especially when that company is Microsoft, and especially when that stands a major chance of ruining all of your previous hard work."
You know I just had to reply to such a curious complaint. FOSS is not only subject to change, but more so due to it's open nature and "defacto" leadership. And no one complains about all the changes required when some code you're depending on changes, or your existing assumptions don't work as well as you thought.
O/S bigotry right in the tags (Score:4, Insightful)
How is a book review flamebait? Why tag a book review with "microsoftsucks" and "vssucks" and even "eclipsesucks"?
There is only one reason, and that is zealotry and bigotry.
LINQ does not sound like craziness (Score:5, Insightful)
I use LINQ almost exclusively in two ways:
1. To access stored procedures
2. To do SQL-like queries on in-memory collections
It works GREAT for both.
Re:recommended for advanced programmers (Score:5, Insightful)
You know, after having had a go at scripting languages (Ruby, Python, PHP) etc. and trying to weed through the morass of Java libraries and excessively complicated deployment and Flex being a fscking joke- .Net/C# comes out the winner.
It's tight, it's typed and cake to deploy. LINQ has potential for low memory use(fast) queries and Sliverlight seems to be much better than AS3/Flash because you get the cheat of direct access to WPF.
eh. Not much of a zealot for any tech here- I would use Smalltalk if it would get the job done. Just a review and some thoughts.
Re:You know..... (Score:5, Insightful)
LINQ sounds like craziness in terms of being able to keep SQL maintained.
You have to look beyond SQL and see the real value of having an abstract in-language query facility which can be remapped, using any number of methods from XML configuration to dependency injection, to any data source which supports LINQ. This is no more complicated than the previous state of affairs in many high level languages with generic data table and grid objects or strings built up as queries. The genius of LINQ is that it compliments the better solutions while replacing the inferior ones and providing some additional goodies, lambda expressions for example. LINQ stands for Language Integrated Query and is NOT just LINQ to SQL (although Microsoft has promoted the hell out of that implementation). Sometimes it pays to look beyond the hype and see what a new technology really does (or does not) bring to the table and if LINQ is just another way to write SQL to you then perhaps you should take another look, because LINQ has much more to offer than just LINQ to SQL.
Save 30-95% on .Net Books. (Score:1, Insightful)
Get it online $31.98
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Re:Oh...I get it! (Score:4, Insightful)
Re:recommended for advanced programmers (Score:3, Insightful)
None of the reasons the GP mentioned in this post have anything to do with "one platform". He seems to be mostly content with C#-the-language, not .NET-the-platform. Java could have its own LINQ analog and type inference already, if only Sun (or Google, or IBM, or other of the big players) wanted it - which they don't. End result - talented language designers like Neal Gafter are leaving the Java scene and joining Microsoft [artima.com] to work on C#. And, given that Neal was the author of the most well thought-out proposal [javac.info] on adding closures to Java, it means that this feature will likely not make it into the language anytime soon - not until Java 8, if it will ever happen (by which time MS will already roll out C# 5.0, etc).
Sad...
Re:recommended for advanced programmers (Score:2, Insightful)
"And I've had wonderful, painless experiences with both technologies in equal measure with the miserable, agonizing experiences."
Agreed. Completely. Perhaps I am just at a stage of being 'over' Java after its changing so many times at really fundamental levels.
I like that there is only VS. I like that there is only IIS and only one (fundamental) .NET config. I like easy delegates...
If I am biased, it's toward easy as opposed to 'for' M$.
That's where I am now. Who is to say that will not change when the Evil Empire decides that Dictionaries are being deprecated and forget to tell anyone?
And the price thing- it is much easier to write hideous Java code and put it on a poorly config-ed Tomcat than that is to do with .NET. That turns in to a price the user has to pay. And sometimes, especially with free(beer) software, the tools can be a bit busted. Tomcat/Apache is definitely a welcome exception to that.
But in the end, realistically, yes, both can lead to bad stuff. Again, I agree with you.
Re:recommended for advanced programmers (Score:5, Insightful)
As many others, you're confusing LINQ to SQL, LINQ to Entities / Entity Framework, and LINQ in general. LINQ to SQL is not a proper ORM, and is restricted to MSSQL. Entity Framework is a LINQ to SQL replacement that is a proper ORM, and is database-agnostic (there was an Entity Framework provider for PostgreSQL released recently, and more are in the works).
LINQ in general is not an ORM. It can be used as a query language for an ORM, which is what LINQ to SQL is about (another example is NHibernate - the recent versions also support LINQ queries). But LINQ is also used in scenarios which do not have anything to do with ORM, or databases in general - LINQ to Objects/XML, to DataSet, and so on. LINQ itself is just a set of standard operators on lazy sequences, established years ago in the functional land - map, filter, fold, take etc - lifted as syntactic sugar into the language itself, with an extensibility API.
Re:recommended for advanced programmers (Score:2, Insightful)
I'm using and deploying C# .NET on Linux in a production environment right now, and I'm absolutely not a Microsoft fan and wouldn't have wanted to anywhere near Windows or Visual Studio prior to .NET and C#.
Mono is absolutely amazing for cross platform development. I develop on Mac OS X, deploy on Linux (and other Unix platforms) and on Windows it it Just Works (TM). I'll admit the first time I ran an app on Windows (with .NET) that I'd developed on Mac OS with IIS I was taken aback with how flawlessly it worked. I've found the only target platform specific code I have is that which I knowingly and deliberately call (for example, to inspect the registry on Windows).
I'm really loopy over the syntax of C#. It's very, very tight and both development and deployment for things like SOAP web service is ridiculously easy - and even more impressive with Mono than with using ISS to server the same content (which generates a lot of automatic documentation and examples for service).
The only major issue I have with Mono right now is that it's not ready for widespread end user application deployment on Mac OS X for GUI applications - it's both unstable and not fully native. However it would still be absolutely fine on Mac OS X server software, code which is called from a Cocoa application (the road I think I am going to have to go down for the Mac version of the application I'm currently working on) or for bespoke / enterprise application deployment.
Of course, I think it's important to mention to that Mono really isn't to .NET what WINE is to Win32 application compatibility - which is an understandable, if inaccurate initial conclusion to come to about it...
While applications built with Mono in mind work great on both Mono and on .NET for Windows, .NET applications written on Windows with Visual Studio are necessarily going to work under Mono without issue, because it's easy to do platform specific code in Visual Studio, particularly when writing desktop software.
So in that respect it's absolutely true to say .NET has issues, but when using Mono it works really well for cross platform application development (with the exception of the caveats mentioned for Mac OS X). Under Linux, I've had no such issues. I will say it takes a bit of work to deploy and package Mono applications for end user deployment, and for now shouldn't be taken too lightly (tools like mkbundle and macpack are great, but in practice can take some work to get up and running under a Windows environment in particular.)