Author(s): Ingo Rammer and Mario Szpuszta
Publisher: APress
Publisher Link: www.apress.com
Published: February 2005
Categories: .NET, Remoting, Distributed computing, C#
ISBN: 1-59059-417-7
Online Order Links: Amazon.com, BN.com, …

  
Review Date: June 2005
Reviewers Name: Trent Whiteley

Summary:

Although the title of this book, Advanced .NET Remoting, obviously indicates that the designated audience for this book is the “advanced” programmer, the initial three chapters deal with the basics of remoting.  Those already familiar with remoting will, more than likely, be bored with this introduction and will be better off starting off in chapters 4 and following.  The authors present the latest distributed application development technologies available as well as weakness in each technology leading up to the presentation of .NET remoting and justifying its existence.  While not presenting .NET remoting as the Holy Grail of distributed computing, they do provide grounds for using it in most situations over the current distributed technologies.  By chapter three the reader has already learned how to write a basic remoting application and is presented with the basic concepts of .NET remoting.  These concepts are clearly explained with great supporting examples.

After the introductory chapters, the authors delve into a number of disjoint topics covering chapters four through ten.  Some of these topics include security, configuration and deployment, object lifetimes, versioning, best practices, and debugging/troubleshooting.  By isolating these topics in their own chapters, the reader can treat this book as a quick reference when questions arise in dealing with one of these areas.  Again the authors provide excellent examples to support their topics, thus aiding in grasping some of the more difficult aspects of remoting.  The authors also present, from their vast experience, a number of different ways of achieving the same results, after which they reveal the advantages of one method over the others or motivations and scenarios where each method can be used to better advantage.  At times, while reading, it appears that there is no one sure way to write remoting apps properly.  This is exactly what the authors are trying to impart.  There are numerous ways to use remoting, but each one has drawbacks or weaknesses and the authors try to give you a broad range of knowledge to deal with them.  There is no silver bullet to writing remoting apps and this sometimes leads to information overload while reading this book.  The reader will likely find himself returning to this book to gain clarity in resolving design issues.

Finally, in the remaining five chapters, the authors get into the nitty gritty of .NET remoting.  Beginning with the underlying structure of remoting, the authors give the reader a baptism by fire in proxies, dispatchers, sinks, channels and messages.  If none of the previous terms are familiar to you, then you may find this chapter a bit of a challenge.  However, it is an extremely well-written section on exactly how remoting works and reading it is time well invested.  Mastering this chapter provides the basis for proceeding through the remainder of the book with your sanity intact as the proceeding chapters deal primarily with extending and customizing .NET remoting.  The chapters on sinks and developing custom sinks provide the reader with some of the best knowledge for creating custom remoting apps as they are the conduits through which all communication passes between client and server.  Understanding channels allows the reader to customize the transport mechanism through which all communication passes.  After successfully navigating through this book, the reader should be well-equipped to handle a vast array of remoting projects.  This book is in no way for the timid and is a challenging read for all but experienced remoting programmers.  Having persevered through its reading, though, the reader will not regret the time invested and the knowledge gained.

This book is most useful to:

This book will be most useful to those developing multi-tier, distributed applications, webservice developers and C# developers in general.

Recommendation:

Reviewer's Overall Cow Rating: 5 out of 5 Cows

I would highly recommend this book to anyone of moderate to advanced experience in .NET and C# with any degree of distributed application development experience.  While the authors present the foundation of remoting early on to provide a basis for understanding to those new to remoting, the remaining sections of the book deal with far more advanced topics (even dealing with the underlying structure of remoting) which will appeal to the more advanced developers.

Publisher: Microsoft Press
Author(s): Dino Esposito
Categories: .NET, ASP.NET 2.0
Published: August 25, 2004
ISBN: 0–735–62024–5
Online Order Links: Amazon, BN.Com, …

Summary:

Going into this book, there are two things you have to remember.  The first is that this book was written and published before most of the other books on the subject and is based on Beta 1 material.  Maybe Dino will edit this book for a second edition, but everything may not be exactly the same as it was for this release. Secondly, this book is called “Introducing ASP.NET 2.0”, and not “Step by Step ASP.NET 2.0” for a reason.  This book shows the differences and enhancements from ASP.NET 1.x to ASP.NET 2.0.  If you can remember these two simple facts, you will find the book much more enjoyable.  At the time of this writing I was not able to find any corrections to the material in this book.  However, I have been told that some of the features written about have been changed from Beta 1 to Beta 2 and the final release when it comes out. 

I found this book to be great for learning the new topics of ASP.NET 2.0, but it is not for a beginner just looking to get started with ASP.NET.  I did enjoy the fact that there are comparisons of ASP, ASP 1.x and ASP 2.0.  This made it much easier for me to know what the differences were and reason behind them.  However, the flow of the book is not always easy to follow, and some of the topics are not discussed in-depth very well.  In those areas I tended to get lost in what Dino is explaining and I had to reread a couple of sentences.  The explanation of the topics and the step by step examples were usually very well written and easy to understand.  Dino’s does his best writing when he explains things using examples in this book.  The book is well worth the price and time that is involved in reading it.  I would recommend this book for anyone that knows about ASP.NET and needs to know the differences and how to use ASP.NET 2.0 components.  It is a good book to get you up to date.  The writing style in the book is not always as straightforward as it could be, but he gets the points across and makes them easy for you to try out.

I feel the book covered what it set out to cover which is to give developers a head start or introduction into ASP.NET 2.0.  Without a doubt, this book covered that and is one of the first books to come to the market about ASP.NET 2.0.  I don’t think you can hold it against the book that changes in the software were made between Beta 1 and Beta 2, as this fact is recognized and mentioned in the beginning of the book.  This book allows for developers and architects to plan for the future and to know what is coming soon.  Dino makes sure to cover topics that have a different approach and methodology than they used to in ASP.NET 1.x so that you can know how you might implement a problem using ASP.NET 2.0.  Dino does make sure you understand that in ASP.NET 2.0 there is less code and you use more controls in order to create web applications.  In fact, these chapters where he shows the new controls and how to use them are my favorite chapters.

Highlights from this book that I enjoyed most are: MasterPages, WebParts, Rich Web Controls, security logon and the DataSource controls that were covered.  These sections alone made the book worth the purchase.  He is able to show how a complicated or code heavy web application in ASP.NET 1.x is much simpler in ASP.NET 2.0.  Actually, there were not many chapters that I didn’t enjoy reading and that did not give me insightful information to ASP.NET 2.0.  If anyone is excited about ASP.NET 2.0 this book should keep you just as excited and get you ready to try out some of the new features in a short time span.  Now I would like to see a book by Dino on just the UI part, similar to the one he did for the Datagrid in ASP.NET 1.x “Building Web Solutions with ASP.NET and ADO.NET”.

I felt that the chapters on data access were not very clear and or straightforward.  The chapters went on too long for a simple introduction and tried to explain data access in too much detail for an ASP.NET book.

Overall I think that this is a great book for someone that is moving from ASP 1.x to ASP 2.0 and just wants to know what Microsoft is planning and how they are planning on implementing each feature.  If this book is not updated to reflect changes to ASP.NET 2.0 as it releases, I think people will start to turn to other books because of the many differences between the release and the beta this book was written from.  If you want an in depth look at ASP.NET 2.0 this book will probably not cover everything you want from beginning to end, but it is a great book for the topics I needed as a developer ready to see ASP.NET 2.0.

This book is most useful to:

• web designers / developers that know how to use ASP.NET 1.1 but want to know just the new features of ASP.NET 2.0
• Technical decision makers that need to know what the technology can do
• experienced web developers looking to get a jump on things by learning about ASP.Net 2.0 before it is released

Recommendation:

4 out of 5 stars

If you want a book that covers only ASP.NET 2.0 this is a good book to start with.  The size of the book and content that is covered will get you up to speed on the new features of ASP.NET 2.0.  This book was written based on Beta 1 so make sure that you realize that some content of the book may have changed. 

This book will take you less than a week, and will get you up to speed on ASP.NET 2.0 concepts.  You will also see that he compares some of the changes to the way it is done in ASP.NET 1.x or ASP which will help you understand some of the uses of the new features.

-- Brendon Schwartz

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This is just a reminder – the May 19th meeting of the .Net Book Club has been cancelled due to the MSDN Event and Pub Club.  Be sure to sign up for the MSDN Event on www.microsoft.com/events!

The Pub Club will be held immediately after the MSDN Event at a nearby location, but you need to attend the MSDN Event or any user group between now and the 19th (the Mobility UG and the VB UG both have meetings scheduled)

— Matt Ranlett

posted with BlogJet

In the Perimeter Mall, over by Bloomingdales, there are several seating areas with sofas, coffee tables, and comfortable chairs.  These are great spots to hold a small group meeting, as the Book Club found out.  Several people can easily sit around a coffee table and hold an interesting conversation without having to move any of the chairs around.

Like all the previous book club meetings, the discussions were very free-ranging and open, covering large areas of subject matter.  While not specifically discussing the chapters of the ASP.Net 2.0 book by Dino Esposito everyone is reading, we did talk about website design including 2.0 components such as membership services.  The conversation started out of a discussion between Brendon and Keith – they are talking about their plans to build an events server that helps keep several user group websites up to date.  The design discussions of this events server turned to web services and ownership of data.  The question became, is it ‘better’ to have a central events server which gets directly updated by UG leaders and then sends down to the UG website a self updating calendar, or is it better for each site to be individually maintained and have the events server be nothing more than a central calendar that gets notified of updates by autonomous user group websites.  The basic question here is, who should own the data, the UG website or the central server?  Brendon and Keith (and I, for that matter) feel that UG leaders don’t really want to worry about maintaining their websites – there is so much to do when running a UG, and no one is getting paid to do it.  So offloading a task like the website management (or a portion of the website) to a central server which handles data storage is preferable to each web site being responsible for maintaining their own data store.  There was some dissent in the group initially, but I think we managed to sway everyone to our side.  Look to Keith and Brendon for upcoming implementation details.

We also talked about notification services, or the lack thereof.  One of the group members was complaining that he didn’t know when the new VS2005 Beta was released until several days after it happened.  He was wishing he could have signed up for an e-mail from MS to alert him when this specific event occurred.  A comparison was drawn to the Saturn car company.  Saturn announced months or years ahead of time that it would be developing an SUV and people could sign up for an e-mail when the SUV was released.  Why, the question was asked, couldn’t Microsoft do the same thing.  After some initial bickering over which implementation method was better (e-mail or RSS) we all finally seemed to agree that the difficulty lies in getting an announcement for an event that is not yet defined.  With both e-mail and RSS, unless someone at the company has the forethought to create a subscription point for that particular event, the only option you have as a consumer is to subscribe to a mass mailing list or general RSS feed.  The analogy here is like looking to fill a small bottle of water from a fire hose.  You end up with a listening service and some kind of keyword based raw text search.  No one could think of a way to subscribe to an event that hadn’t been defined yet.  Well, almost no one.  Brendon actually has an idea about this and he’s writing a white paper he plans on submitting to Microsoft.

All in all, this was one of the better book club meetings because we not only discussed technology, but we discussed the technology from the book we were all supposed to be reading.  We all hung around until about 9:00 when we noticed the mall closing around us.  Check back with the book club website, a map of the mall with the meeting location will be posted soon.  We enjoyed the location enough that we’re heading back there next time.

— Matt Ranlett

note – a comment was made in the book club meeting that some of Dino’s examples from the book wouldn’t work with the new Beta 2 due to some framework and tool changes.  Take a look at this post from Shanku Niyogi – the ASP.Net group program manager outlining the Upcoming Changes to ASP.Net 2.0 in Beta 2.

If you get this before it's too late, we hope to see everyone out at the 5 Seasons brew pub on Roswell Rd (just inside the Perimeter) at 6:30 for the Atlanta .Net Book Club