.NET-A Complete Development Cycle

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Summary: practical guide to make the transition to .net
Review: A valuable guide for everyone who wnats to make a smooth transition to the .NET environment using state of the art techniques and Software Engineering practices.

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Summary: Brings Together The Development Process
Review: First I have to admit, I really wanted to like this book. I have been studying the Unified Process, UML and .NET for a while now, but it was all in separate pieces. I wanted one book that would tie the whole thing together, and this was the first one I had seen that did that.

The book did a good job of walking you through iterations with some hand-holding, but also a "you've seen enough, go do it on your own" to be very useful. One of my primary complaints against most tech books is that they show you how to do everything without making you think it through by doing some exercises on your own. This book gives you a chance to work on your own after showing you how to do certain things (much more like the real development process where you get specs, not answers).

All that said, there are a couple of caveats for those who are thinking about buying the book.
1) It is all in C#. While the book does intro you to C#, you will probably want a good C# book around to help if you are not already familiar with it. (One thing I found interesting after doing most of my work in vb.net is the case sensitivity. In vb, you can type "imports system." and then get all the drop downs, in c#, the caps are important so it is "using System." and typing it as "system." fails to include the namespace).
2) The book is an overview of a very ambitious topic. The good thing here is the authors give you lots of places to go to delve deeper into the topics they present. Note, I don't think this is a fault of the book. There are entire books written to cover things that these guys cover in a chapter. Don't expect to read this book and understand the Unified Process, Software Engineering, UML, C#, Deployment, etc. What it will do is give you the big picture understanding you need in order to go into further detail for learning the pieces you need to build on.

Finally, there were a couple of small annoyances. The CD includes the visio files for the project, but they don't always match the printed portion of the book and in some cases aren't given at all. As I was working with some other tools and trying to practice building the diagrams, this was a minor annoyance. Along with that came times where a screen print would show a directory path on the CD that was different from what was actually there. It's close enough to be able to figure it out, but it still would be nice to have all of the documentation files and also to have the screen prints match.

So, the bottom line is this - it's the best book I have seen so far on tying together modern development practices under one cover. As such, it makes a great intro into the topic and is a good learning tool. However, it is not a comprehensive treatment of any of the topics. If you are looking for that, you will need to get a book dedicated to the topic (for instance UML or Agile Development). If you are looking for something to help make sense of how all the pieces fit together and to help you get your feet wet in walking through a sample development cycle, this is an excellent book.

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Summary: Visual Studio Magazine posting:
Review: I wish I read .NET - A Complete Development Cycle two years ago when I started .NET development. This book by Gunther Lenz and Thomas Moeller explains how the .NET Framework works in high-level detail that lets you understand why it's different from other software development paradigms. The subject matter flows logically, and there are plenty of examples you can sink your teeth into.

The book describes various development models, giving the pros and cons of each. If you're an experienced programmer, you can use these chapters as a refresher, but you won't find anything groundbreaking. I enjoyed the "conclusions" and "review" sections, because they let you verify you understood what the authors were trying to convey. They discussed numerous topics in detail, including threading, GDI, and Web technologies. All the examples were helpful; the book includes a CD so you don't have to download the examples.

This book does a good job of describing the various aspects of software development. It is aimed at the developer working in the .NET environment, but many aspects of the book can be applied across all development platforms. .NET - A Complete Development Cycle is geared toward entry-level developers or programmers migrating to the .NET platform. This book is certainly worth the money in either case.

.NET - A Complete Development Cycle
by Gunther Lenz and Thomas Moeller

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Summary: Not quite satisfying
Review: It's all a question of balance. You can apply these words of wisdom to managing software development projects and to planning out the contents of a book, but it's still a tightrope that both must face. Gunther Lenz and Thomas Moeller have learnt this balance across many of their own software projects and now try to reflect their experience in this new book which, as it says on the tin, covers the complete development cycle of a .NET software project.

In almost minute detail then, we are taken inch by inch through the analysis, design, implementation, deployment, and maintenance strategies of a C# and ASP.NET photo shop application, to be found on the CD supplied with the book. And somehow, in 540 pages we manage to cover pretty much everything that would take a hobbyist coder and make him at home on a large scale structured enterprise project. Well, everything except experience and good, solid programming skills, anyway.

Chapter one is perhaps the only throwaway text, introducing .NET and Visual Studio as the IDE of choice for .NET development in case you weren't already using it. Past that however the information comes thick and fast, starting with explanations of no less than ten different development models to give us a look and feel of them all before using the Unified Process to develop the project for the rest of the book. Subsequently, we are thrown into prototyping, unit testing with NUnit, designing systems with UML, building requirements tables, using Visual Source Safe to implement a version control system, refactoring code across point releases, integrating COM modules into .NET projects, threading issues, deployment and strategies for the maintenance and upgrade of software as required. It's quite a list and there's also the complete code listing for the application thrown in.

It's nicely written and demonstrates a lot, but that's all it does really: demonstrates things. It's also a single, long case study of a near-problem-free project, but when has that ever happened save in the very smallest of developments? What this book cannot provide for is the human side of a team. Real world scenarios like losing a team member and getting negative feedback from a client are covered, but with a brevity that keeps the book moving but which few people will appreciate. Indeed, it's this brevity which is equally the book's strength and its weakness. It covers a lot of ground succinctly and well but many times you'd wish it would explain more of a topic or even just justify the assertions it has made before whisking onto the next item in its agenda. How does one debug thread-related issues for example, and why should a project's requirements be structured in XML? As you read, you may come across techniques which are new, but you'll end up looking to other references to actually comprehend and learn them well.

Books usually suffer from waffle. Ironically, it's the very opposite that lets down this otherwise solid book, with the editing making it a very clean, efficient book at the cost of a genuine feel and engagement with the reader. Like most software projects, the book does what it set out to do, but could do with some more documentation.

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Summary: J2EE should look in its rear view mirror
Review: Microsoft is ramping up its .NET effort in order to overtake J2EE in the marketplace. As many well know, Microsoft has done this successfully in the past, ranging from the browser war against Netscape to deploying a fully fledged GUI against Apple, who squandered a many year lead.

Can Microsoft repeat this with .NET? Well, it needs to present .NET as a fully fledged environment for code design and development. The book gives an independent explanation of .NET's capabilities. At the highest level, the authors devote an entire crucial chapter to showing how all the common development models ( Extreme Programming, Waterfall, Spiral, Adaptive,...) can be done in the .NET context. They flush out the book by providing an extended example application and show how to apply the full development cycle to it. In working through this, they (no surprise!) hit on the salient features of .NET.

As a java/linux developer, I do have to say that it does seem quite formidable and complete. A key existing strength that they are leveraging is Visual Studio for .NET. If you have used the pre-.NET Visual Studio, it greatly eases the learning curve.

J2EE should look in its rear view mirror.

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Summary: Jump start into .NET
Review: This book is a great support when making the switch to .NET. Finally there is a book that not only teaches the language but also provides lots of references and shows the practical application of .NET on an extended case study. Building the application is fun because you can immediately see the success of your implementation on the screen by doing some cool image processing. On the other hand if you just want to follow the book without programming a line of code, then take the CD that contains all the sample solutions. The book is not a reference of .NET but rather it should be used in addition to a reference book to get a jump-start into software engineering best practices and .NET. The book shows what state of the art tools (like NUnit, Defect Tracking etc) and software engineering methodologies can be used to successfully make the transition to .NET development. The book is great for architects, developers, project managers and quality engineers that want to get a jump-start into the practical application of .NET. I think this book hits the spot for everyone starting .NET development from any other OO language. The CD contains all the source code and tools that are used during the course of the book.

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Summary: Excellent building block for your .NET career
Review: This book is excellent if you are a Computer Science student or a programmer looking to get into .NET. The book uses the unified software development process and weaves .NET with an iterative model consisting of requirements, analysis, design, implementation and testing. The reader plays the role of a team member and is assigned tasks. Hence in a way this book simulates a real work environment, and in my opinion it does a pretty good job. Obviously a real work environment has many other issues but those are out of the scope of this book. This book covers a lot in 500 pages. After this book a person can then get into more dense books which explain the .NET framework and programming in more detail such as:
#1. Jeff Prosise's Programming .NET
#2. Dino Esposito's ASP.NET and ADO.NET
#3. Jeffrey Richter's .NET Framework
#4. Dino Esposito's Applied XML Programming for Microsoft.NET
#5. John Robbin's Debugging Applications with .NET and Windows Applications

All these books are written by authoritative and well respected individuals in the industry, but these books might be too indepth and overwhelming for a person looking to get his/her feet wet with .NET. Once you get started with .NET then these books will be an excellent resource for building your .NET career, actually at the end of various chapters Lenz and Moeller have referenced these same books for further reading.

Bottom Line: ".NET A complete Development Cycle" does an excllent job of building a .NET foundation on which you can construct your .NET career by continously learning from the list of books I have mentioned above in combination with real world experience.

Word of Advice: Before starting ".NET A complete Development Cycle" you should be able to program and I don't mean Hello World, you should be comfortable with OOP, it would work best if you knew C#. If you are a novice to programming then you will have a hard time. In my opinion the minimum reader proficiency should be that of a senior year Computer Science student. However, there are always exceptions if you have worked a lot with html, have done some scripting, understand how the internet works, file structures, okay working with an IDE and don't mind digging in a little bit than you can also use this book.

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Summary: May be a good book for introductory course on Software Engg.
Review: This can probably qualify as a good book for an introductory course on software engineering, and nothing else.

The reviews here suggest that this is a great book for an architect, team-lead etc. Being one, I took up on this book and really disappointed in what I expected to see.

I was hoping to see that some of the advanced topics such as:

- Software packaging
- Zero-touch deployment
- Dynamic assembly caches

But the whole book is about a product/project that is a mere case-study than any thing else. The side topics of "project management" issues are some what there for the sake of being there rather than glued into the topics being covered.

A different title such as "SDLC - A Case Study", might suite better for this book. One can probably grab much more by simply reading a Visutal Studio .NET complete reference book - or even working out all the examples provided by Microsoft.

If you are brand new to software development and would like to see the overall approach in a software product development, then this might suite you as it would give you a head-start. Every topic is covered in great detail in that regards. Worth every penny for such a person.