Richard Collette said
This was a very interesting read. Yes, it documents the CSLA framework but the book provides more than that. For example, the chapter that includes WCF custom security modules provided a far better concrete than I discerned from reading Juval Lowy's book (which I thought was excellent as well) and there is not a whole lot of reliance on CSLA in those examples. The chapters on creating custom IPrincipal objects were very informative as well. Looking at the CSLA framework code, I learned methods of using generics that I have not seen elsewhere. Whether or not you wind up using the CSLA framework, there a good takeaways from reading this book.

This is not an ORM book or framework. It does not even remotely pretend to be ORM related. ORMs do not, generally, comprehensively implement the standard Microsoft interfaces (and more) for security, validation and UI interfaces for validation message display, data binding, remoting, LINQ integration, N-tier, command pattern, etc. CSLA.NET does. Most people skip the notion of developing true business objects and head straight for datasets, entities or NHibernate. The reality is that business objects are a logical tier on top of these data access technologies. I do admit that I would like to see the author take advantage of some of the hooks for custom objects in EF 2.0 which might provide some development productivity gains, but currently his focus is on Silverlight 3 functionality.

The book is quite lengthy, but rather than being "dummies" fluff, it is to the point and understandable, much like Juval Lowy's WCF book. And while long, it is possible to skip around the book a little bit. The first 200 pages are a must read before jumping elsewhere. The design portion which covers the design of CSLA.net may not be absolutely necessary reading and is a large portion of the book, but in the end you'll wind up going back to read it and it will provide a more thorough understanding of CSLA.net

R. Balsover said
There is a lot of valuable code in this book and the accompanying framework that allows you to write scalable enterprise solutions without a lot of effort, however.... The framework seems more complicated than it needs to be and almost necessitates the need for a code generator such as CodeSmith (which BTW is an excellent tool); I get the feeling that it is carrying some baggage from prior versions of the framework. Adding Silverlight support might be good for selling books or gaining points as a MS Evangelist for the faithful, but it adds unnecessary baggage to applications that don't need it and no, I don't plan on writing anything with Silverlight in the near future even if MS marketing is pushing it.

The .NET 1.1 version of this framework has IMHO a cleaner design even though it didn't use Generics or Linq. Perhaps it is time for Rockford to tear it all down and start over as he did when he went from VB6 to VB.NET.

Jose Rolando Guay Paz said
So, the book is very well organized and written. The ideas are very clear and it actually make me think in the way I normally architect projects. Don't get me wrong, I'm not doing it that bad, is just it has opened my eyes to other possibilities and some better techniques.

With this book, it's clear that Rockford Lhotka is quite an expert in architecture and design.

Now, please, make sure you read the first book Beginning C# 2008 Objects From Concept to Code so you'll get a better and more pleasant reading experience.

Overall, I highly recommend this book if you are a software architect and/or work with n-tier projects or enterprise class projects.

By: Jose Rolando Guay Paz



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La estructura utilizada se adapta a las expectativas requeridas, los ejemplos varios refuerzan la practica del lenguaje. Las estructuras se pueden entender de manera facil. La explicacion detallada de lassintaxis fomenta su practicabilidad, asi mimsmo desarrolla y refuerza nociones sobre la programacion del lenguaje C#.

Las tablas presentan detalladamente las propiedades, descripciones, atributos, tipos, metodos, etc.

By: Marlon Joao Maaz B.


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Por la utilizacion de profesionales utilizando orientado a objetos C# veo muy util los objetos de negocios presentados.

Creo que este libro es muy completo ya que inicia con estructura, diseno de la plataforma, luego las aplicaciones y todo con muchos ejemplos. En general, muy bueno.

By: Hector Armando Macz Bac

Panitte Tuangsuwan said
In this book, "the different and bold way of software design is introduced." We are people who USE it everyday. We agreed with some reviewer (who rated this item very low!) and their opinions are true! But they are NOT fully understanding the key concepts (Business Objects & CSLA) this book has introduced.

YES, that's right! The Business Object "violated" every principle of software design Eric Evans (in his book, Domain-Driven Design: Tackling Complexity in the Heart of Software) and Martin Fowler (in Patterns of Enterprise Application Architecture (Addison-Wesley Signature Series)) give. Both Evans & Fowler are geniuses and principles they give are valuable. The principles are prepared for SCALABLE and future CHANGES in business requirements by SEPARATING concerns called Separation of Concerns (SoC) into layers and components. But, different and bold, Business Objects & CSLA favors object inheritance, instead.

*** If you understand the concepts in this book, it uses inheritance to normalize object's behaviors instead of its data (Many developers use inheritance for data normalization as we do it for RDBMS). Behaviors Normalization is very interesting concept. ***

..............................................................................

-- "Business Objects" vs. "Evans & Fowler (E&F)" --

1. Concept Complexity -- Business Object is very complex concept and needs some time to study while E&F is simplified. In our opinion, both take some time to experience.

2. Scalable for Enterprise Application -- Both are doing well for this. (When we talk about enterprise application, we mean the application that applied n-tier concept, supported large users, and solved complex business requirements.)

3. Productivity -- We brought this up because we think Business Object has this advantage. The framework increases your productivity to create new application with rich features**.

4. Changes in Software Design -- Many people think Business Objects is inflexible because it favors inheritance. That could be so true, but depended on how you use it. If you use the Business Objects that is rich-featured** or fat-featured** for simple application that doesn't need those features, it'll be a bad choice. However, what we suggest is to learn the concepts in this book and implement your own Business Objects based on Behavior Normalization. What we did is we created our own several Business Objects using concepts from the book and use what is suitable. We also applied E&F in our Business Objects. It takes some time to create Business Object as base class for real Business Object. But once you have it, you can create real business object very fast and that gives you productivity.

While E&F is very flexible, but may not be simple as it seems. What we like about E&F is that it's made for changes (SoC, Cohesion, and Coupling.)

5. **Concept Focus -- When you try to compare these two concepts, you are easily getting confused. Why? Because they are different. Concepts of Domain Modeling and Enterprise Architecture focus on separation of concern for changes. What they separated is functionality, Each layer and class must have strong concern or responsibility and it must be lowest as possible. A class should have one reason (concern or responsibility) to change. While Business Objects focus on object's behaviors, and only deals with Business Logic Layer and Data Access Layer. We all know that dealing with BLL & DAL is painful.

There are a lot of interesting things to learn from this book. But this is too much to write here!

..............................................................................


** Rich Features, Business Objects provide
- Validation and maintaining a list of broken business rules.
- Standard implementation of business & validation rules
- Authorization & authentication
- Strongly typed collections of child objects
- N-level undo capability
- Simple model for UI developer, Data Binding supported.
- Simple model for Data Access

Last word, Don't buy this book if you don't expect to learn different software design. Business Objects is not the best practice, it's just a practice. Business Objects is not solution you're looking for. There are no one best solution for every problem, but every problem has one best solution. Business Objects does not create an application, it helps you create the application.

Benjamin Kaiser said
This book is written much better than its 2005 counterpart. The section are divided in such a way that you can read the book from cover to cover or skip to a section. This is a must read for any object oriented programmer, even those not involved with traditional server/client architectures.