Rating: 
Summary: Must have If you are doing professional applicattions
Review: I really enjoyed reading this book. While learning a lot of things, you get a complete working framework (CSLA.Net) that can be used for about all database applications.
Rating:
Summary: Highly-recommended book
Review: I'm an MCSD with about six years of development experience, mostly with web applications. I highly recommend this book to anyone interested in developing a very scalable business application framework. I'm not yet done reading the entire book, but I already can't wait to implement these techniques when converting my company's existing huge ASP application to ASP.net. Many thanks to the author!
Rating: 
Summary: tough book to swallow with alot of architecture
Review: just started looking at the book.
this book takes alot of thought setting the program up and
understanding why the author designed his patterns
the way they are.
this book is for the heavy weights.
good job he has a personal discussion group which cover
70% of the problems which I am encountering otherwise
I will stay a beginner
Rating:
Summary: Must-Read for every .NET Developer
Review: The amount of information provided by this book is enormous! Not only does Rocky explain how to build and use business objects in .NET, but he also provides a complete business object framework.All .NET developers (not just VB.NET!!!) can benefit greatly from this book. Rocky provides insight and experience that would take years to accumulate, or hundreds of consulting hours to purchase.
Rating:
Summary: Outstanding, even for a C# developer...
Review: This book follows probably the most logical progression of any technically oriented book I've ever read. Architecture and Design
Key Technologies
Implementing a Business Framework
OO Design
Business Object Design (using the Framework)
Windows, Web, and Web Services Interfaces
Reporting and Batch Processing
The premise of this book is that there are best practices that apply when building software systems. We've all heard that catchphrase before, but Rocky does a very good job of distilling it down to a practical level. The book walks you through from proposed architecture to a fully functioning program, and along the way you learn some very powerful concepts: Business rule tracking
Principal-based security
n-Level Undo
DataBinding
Remoting over HTTP
Reflection
Transactional methods using both COM+ (Enterprise Services) and native .NET OleDbTransaction and SqlTransaction
Lightweight collection objects
The true best use of web services No-touch deployment
My favorite parts of the book were: 1. His approach to data access. Rather than creating a separate Portal object and forcing the UI to create two objects to access data, this framework places virtual methods in the base classes that must be overridden in the business classes. The system then uses Reflection to call back into the business object (from the Portal object) for the implementation of the data portal methods. The UI developer, however, sees none of this. Instead, the UI calls static factory methods to fetch business objects, and a very simple Save() method to add, update, and delete. This is a very intuitive approach, because the abstract nature of a Save() command is very comfortable to a UI developer. 2. Separate, lightweight objects for collections (for display in lists &c). Since this intelligent business object approach can create fairly "heavy" business objects, the framework has some great base classes for collections. Since you usually display only summary information in lists &c, why not create a specific lightweight object just for this purpose? Rocky shows you how to do this using structs rather than objects. This helps performance since they are a value type and stored on the stack. That may seem counterintuitive, but since this framework makes heavy use of serialization to pass objects across the wire by remoting, the gains from using reference types are mostly wiped out anyway. 3. His approach to web services is very practical. Rather than seeing them as a universal savior and placing them as interfaces between every nook and cranny of our code, he takes the approach that they are the "machine interface" to our code, rather than the human interface. This frees us up to develop the business functionality for a specific project, create the forms and/or web UI, then build a specific web services interface to that project/module when the need arises for an external API. He also talks at length about the foolishness of exposing our core business objects to the web services interface. If we do that, we lose the ability to change the interface, because the external contract has been established. Imagine, for example, if UPS suddenly decided to change its web services interface. Mass chaos. Rather, he shows how to create methods that are specific to the web services interface, and are more abstract in their implementation, thus less likely to need changes. As a C# programmer, I was a little leery of buying this book, but I found out that by having to translate the code in the book, rather than just typing it in, I had to think more about the techniques involved. This helped so much, in fact, that I would now purposely buy books that are not in my language of choice, so that I can better understand the concepts instead of the syntax.
Rating:
Summary: Best book on n-tier architected solutions using .NET
Review: This excellent book describes a reusable framework (CSLA) that is both flexible and relevant to real world development. The author really goes the extra mile in explaining how to build the framework and why he made certain choices. This is a must have book for any serious developer interested in improving their craft. The book is not for inexperienced or self righteous developers, many who seem to have reviewed this book. This book is by far the best book available on n-tier architected solutions using .NET. The described framework is scalable from a single workstation to a multi server environment. The best companion book is `Code Generation in Microsoft .NET" by Kathleen Dollard where the templates for code generation used in her book are based on the CSLA framework. Save yourself a lot of typing and get her book.
Rating:
Summary: Best book on n-tier architected solutions using .NET
Review: This excellent book describes a reusable framework (CSLA) that is both flexible and relevant to real world development. The author really goes the extra mile in explaining how to build the framework and why he made certain choices. This is a must have book for any serious developer interested in improving their craft. The book is not for inexperienced or self righteous developers, many who seem to have reviewed this book. This book is by far the best book available on n-tier architected solutions using .NET. The described framework is scalable from a single workstation to a multi server environment. The best companion book is 'Code Generation in Microsoft .NET" by Kathleen Dollard where the templates for code generation used in her book are based on the CSLA framework. Save yourself a lot of typing and get her book.
Rating:
Summary: Distributed Apps for the masses
Review: This is by far one of the best .net books ever written. Lhotka manages to bring together all the pieces of .net and show how they can be put together and deployed in the real-world. I truly believe that this book should be issued with visual studio. If you want to build scalable multi-tier apps, buy this book. You won't regret it. P.S. Get this book while you can! Its ashame that the publishing company Wrox went under and its titles were liquidated to several smaller companies. Currently, Wiley has the wrox name, but they only bought rights to like 30 of the 300 titles.
Rating:
Summary: Distributed Apps for the masses
Review: This is by far one of the best .net books ever written. Lhotka manages to bring together all the pieces of .net and show how they can be put together and deployed in the real-world. I truly believe that this book should be issued with visual studio. If you want to build scalable multi-tier apps, buy this book. You won't regret it. P.S. Get this book while you can! Its ashame that the publishing company Wrox went under and its titles were liquidated to several smaller companies. Currently, Wiley has the wrox name, but they only bought rights to like 30 of the 300 titles.
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