Designing Scalable .Net Applications

Rating:
Summary: A good book to have.
Review: A realize early that the book has potential.
The content of the chapters are of high quality, even if I as a developer sometimes wanted more of the technical stuff (who doesn't ;-)?)
But since the goal for the book is to focus on the whole picture and ties the hardware and the software design together in an easy understandable way I can highly recommend this book.
I especially like the chapters about databases and the web service that described how to use the WSE kit from Microsoft in an easy manner. Thanks guys for the book!

Rating:
Summary: Good overview for architects
Review: The book sets some ambitious goals for itself, to teach anyone involved with the technical process what they need to know about .NET development. The book does indeed cover a wide range of .NET topics organized from the outside starting with coverage of complete application architecture including EAI with other systems, and them moving in towards the operating system, the web server, the development architecture and SQL. All of these topics are covered at a white paper level. In fact, the whole book reads and feels like one large white paper.

So, on the up side it's a very good high level introduction to all of the concepts involved with .NET development of web applications. It's well written, although it could use some editing, and the concepts are explained well.

One the down side, the book really does feel like an extended white paper. The topics aren't covered with enough depth to satisfy engineers so this book is probably best for architects and managers who want a high-level introduction to .NET. It's pretty buzzword heavy, for example in chapter four the coverage of workarounds around limitations in the operating system is called 'best practices'. Don't expect any coverage of systems other than Microsoft or comparisons to alternative systems.

The interesting chapters:

Chapter one covers EAI, content management systems and UML, which is an interesting place to start. The coverage is brief but well done.

Chapter two covers the various windows services. This is a good introduction to the topic.

Chapter three covers windows clustering and is one of the best chapters in the book, clean, concise and well written.

Chapter five is the heart of the book. It's a super long chapter that covers everything about web application architecture in .NET including design patterns and coding standards. Both the design patterns and coding standards section could have been in appendices. I'm not sure the design patterns was worth covering at the depth that it was.

Chapter six is about web services and it's a fine chapter that runs a bit long. Still, it's one of the best chapters in the book.

Chapters seven, about IIS, and eight, about SQL, would have been better a little longer and more detailed. The SQL chapter could have mentioned some use of alternative database servers.

Chapter nine, which covers and example application, probably should have been in the beginning with the rest of the book covering the example in greater depth.

Rating:
Summary: Very good overview of designing scalable .net enterprise app
Review: This is a very good overview on how to design scalable .net enterprise applications.
The book covers most aspects concerned. We get coverage of how to choose the operating system for each layer in a scalable application. We further get input on how to choose the right cluster architecture, database and storage design, application design (including a thorough overview of web services design).
The fact that Sten Sundblad has written the foreword witnesses the quality and importance of this book.
The first 8 chapters are dedicated to theory. In the ninth (and last) chapter we also get to follow some use cases from UML modeling to finished code. In between we get info about how to set up the application environment and choosing storage design. Focus is always on scalability design, something many developers might need to spend more time on.
For me at least, this has been very interesting and educational. Hopefully you will fell the same.