Rating: 
Summary: Average book, missleading title.
Review: Bought this book hoping it was a good guide to developing enterprise applications in VS.Net with UML (visio); man was I wrong. If you have the slightest idea of what UML is, and you know your way around VS.Net, go somewhere else. It just scratches the surface of a lot of things and you have probably read this somewhere else. But, the reason for the three stars is that if you are new to VS.Net, this is actually a good book. It has a lot of heuristics and guidelines for a rookie developer, on how to plan you project, protect your code and deploy your applications. Not exactly what I was looking for.
Rating: 
Summary: Neat autogenerating code from UML diagrams
Review: For developers on a Microsoft platform, Microsoft has offered Visual Studio as its flagship development environment. A very sophisticated package. Naturally, as .NET was fleshed out, VS has been upgraded to help you program in that framework. The authors accordingly go into reams of detail, with numerous screen captures, showing what VS.NET can do for you.They also cover how VS can be integrated with UML. So that, as a very nifty feature, VS can autogenerate code given as input a set of UML diagrams. To some of you, it will be a big timesaver, and it lets you concentrate on writing the key parts of your code, not boilerplate. Of course, different developers will have different needs, but clearly some of you will appreciate this UML ability. The authors also talk about using Microsoft Solutions Framework as a project design framework. Much here is not instrinsically tied to .NET or even Microsoft. This part of the book has a lot of high level jargon. The ideas seem clear enough. But so does a lot of other ideas about project design and management. There is a big impedance mismatch between this chapter and the rest of the book. Perhaps the chapter could have been expanded into a book of its own?
Rating: 
Summary: Good companion to have after you have mastered VB/Net or C#
Review: I have been working with .Net for almost 2 years now. This book is a good companion to enhance your over-all skills as a .Net developer. It really helps to see how you would use UML and MSF to complement your .Net coding skills. There are areas of this book that tends to drag (really, we didn't need the comparison to Rational XDE nor did we realy need to cover Visual Source Safe).
What I would like to have seen is actual documents that would be produced when going through the life cycle as described in section six - MSF (this is where a lot of books fall short).
But sections 1 - 4 (with the exception perhaps of VSS) are real gems. Definitely worth the price of the book.
Good job John & Carsten!
Rating:
Summary: Huge - but nice
Review: I read this book before taking the MSF practitioner exam and it's one of my best MSF sources. Another thing I like about the book is that this book starts where most .NET books stops; at the entrance to enterprise development. Finally a book not taking the easy way of teaching .NET development. It guides you thoroughly into the world of enterprise projects. Especially I like the way enterprise templates are described using exercises. Do get this book if you want a guide and a reference to enterprise development using .NET.
Rating: 
Summary: Better once out there
Review: I work for a large corporation in Sweden and we have been looking for books on this particular topic and now there is one covering almosr all of the enterprise segment of .net development. I wish it had included more on patterns but there's already enough information in the book to warrant the price tag and our 5 star rating.
Rating:
Summary: Comprehensive and full fletched
Review: Info, info, info! The book is packed with info for the enterprise dev team. And its good info from page 1 right until the end. If i have to pick a favourite section it would have to be the enterprise tools section as it really gave our team a boost in understanding the enterprise architect tools in just a few weeks. We would have have spent much mcuh longer obtaining this info in other ways.
I hope you the author is ready for the next version of visual studio.
Rating:
Summary: Exactly what we need to get started
Review: It is rare that you come across a book that helps you with so many issues as this book does. We have a large library in our company and I make regular use of many of them. I do find that when speaking of .Net and enterprise development there is not a lot of books book covering this topic. Sure there are many books that does a good job of covering some of the areas but what we wanted was a book that took us from start till finish and this book does. I read the book cover to cover and then I ordered an extra copy that subsequently has been read by our project managers and various developers. There's a wealth of information in this book and if you follow the MSF guidelines (outlined in chapter 20) for creating successful software projects and at the same time use the right tools (which the authors do a great job of explaining) then you have the odds on your side.
Rating:
Summary: Hard work
Review: It must have taken quite some time to get all the information in this book together. A number of topics covered can be found in msdn but there's also plenty of other enterprise relevant information like msf and uml. I like the way the book is written and where the information overlaps the sometimes tedious coverage in msdn the authors present the information in an intuitive way and with many extras. One extra is the way you manually unbind a vs .net project from vss, excellent.
Rating:
Summary: Worth the wait -- Digs Deep
Review: This book was a pre-order but I'm very very happy. The authors give me exactly what i want, more UML, more Visio, more very detailed information about everything. Examples, editing the proj files (csproj and vbproj) with notepad to change source control, build orders, etc. Likewise, the editing of the proj.webinfo file resolved a major headache for me. Another great example was strong naming. Good information on a somewhat arcane topic and an excellent link to MSDN. I've already used the book 2-3 times this week to resolve real world issues. The only thing i would have liked more would be more of an emphasis on Design Patterns along with the UML. The discussion of Rational XDE was also great!! I'm buying more of this book for staff and recommending it to fellow architects.
Rating:
Summary: First true .net enterprise dev book
Review: This must be the very first true book about enterprise development with .Net, and I love it. Staring off with chapter 1, you really get a feel for what the book is about. Chapters 2, 3, 4 and 5 gently introduces you to msf and uml and leads up to chapter 6 in which the book takes off with some simple examples. chapter 7 could have been placed before chapter 6, but it's okay where it is as it is about uml maintenance. Chapters 8,9 and 10 are excellent introductions (and more than that) to enterprise project templates; some very nice writing here. Chapters 11, 12, 13 and 14 covers most of the enterprise vs .net tools, with the vss chapter and chapter 12 being the best, and chapter 15 contains some great coverage of .net deployment. Chapters 16 and 17 are hands on chapters and they truly build on the information presented previously in the book, excellent. Chapters 18 and 19 are a bit poor in that they don't really introduce that much information but I guess that if you are looking for alternatives to Visio uml modelling they give you something to work with (Rational xde). Chapter 20 is a really nice "summary" of msf 3.0 and if you are new to msf this chapter will get you op to speed in no time. Overall this book contains so much information that it is hard to see why you would not want to read it. Oh, and the appendix is a great way of finding information related to this book.
| 
