Rating:  - VERY HIGHLY RECOMMNDED!
Do you have the skills to design and develop component-based .NET applications? If you don't, this book is for you! Author Juval Lowy, has done an outstanding job of writing a great book that teaches you the skills you need to understand .NET component programming and related system issues; as well as, information that is relevant to design options, tips, best practices, and pitfalls.
Lowy begins by providing the basic terminology used throughout the book. Next, the author describes the elements of .NET. such as the Common Language Runtime (CLR), .NET programming languages, the code-generation process, assemblies, and building and composing those assemblies. Then, he examines working with interfaces. The author continues by dealing with the way .NET manages objects, and the good and bad implications this has for the overall .NET programming model. In addition, the author next describes the .NET version-control policy and the ways you can deploy and share its components. He also shows you how to publish and subscribe to events in a component-based application. Next, the author describes .NET's built-in support for invoking asynchronous calls on components, the available programming models, their trade-offs, when to use them, and their pitfalls. Then, he explains in depth how to build multithreaded components. The author continues by showing you how to persist and serialize an object's state. In addition, the author demystifies .NET support for remote calls. He also describes a powerful and useful facet of .NET: its ability to provide ways to define custom services via contexts and call interception. Finally, he addresses the rich topic of .NET code-access security.
With the preceding in mind, the author has also done an excellent job of writing a book that helps you start developing .NET components immediately, taking full advantage of the .NET development infrastructure and application frameworks. In other words, this book takes advantage of what both .NET 1.1 and .NET 2.0 have to offer.
Rating: - A good guide to the intricacies of .NET Component-oriented programming
One of the benefits of .NET is that is makes component-oriented programming much easier and efficient, building on previous technologies that were forbidding in complexity and limited in scope. Programming .NET Components by Juwal Löwy from the fine O'Reilly publishing house provides an excellent guide through the intricacies of component programming in .NET.
It begins with a look at the differences between component-oriented versus object-oriented programming. The author then addresses the principles of component-oriented programming such as binary compatibility, language independence and location transparency, showing how .NET adheres to these principles. He discusses .NET basics from a detailed perspective, covering assemblies, deployment and metadata, providing a Visual Studio 2005 perspective.
Next, aspects of interface-based programming are considered with VS2005 features like the ability to generate skeletal implementations and refactoring. Interfaces are collections of methods that provide access points to the component from external clients. Components can implement any number of interfaces, providing the ability to extend functionality easily without breaking existing clients. Again, generics provide a means of defining an abstract template for an interface and using it on multiple components with different specifications. This reduces code bloat while preserving type-safety.
The next chapter looks at the niceties of garbage collection in .NET, which deals with the disposal of managed objects created while a program is run. Pre-managed code, memory leakage was commonplace because of programs that did not clean up after themselves. The garbage collector takes care of that for the programmer, although abstruse features such as non-deterministic finalization mean that one cannot be really sure when the garbage collector will come around, although patterns to mitigate this are covered.
After an overview of versioning, including a look at side-by-side execution of multiple .NET CLR versions, the book moves into a set of chapters dealing with critical elements of component-oriented programming - events, asynchronous calls and multi-threading. Events and asynchronous calls are mechanisms to allow components to notify their clients when a specified condition occurs. These could be Windows-type events like Mouse-clicks or custom events. The introduction of generic delegates opens new vistas for event management. Some of the concepts presented here should be part of the .NET framework for their simplicity and brilliance.
Since all .NET programs are multi-threaded, they allow concurrent execution of multiple code contexts. A multi-threaded application is more responsive to users. In the past, development of such applications has not been a task for the faint-hearted. Tthis thorny problem is mitigated in .NET by a number of convenient features for concurrency management, increasing developer productivity. The book looks at the various elements of synchronization, even providing a convenient helper class.
Subsequent chapters cover serialization, remoting and security, with weighty appendices on generics, web services and a C# Coding Standard based on the best practices in this book, itself the de facto standard for C# coders. This is a book with much meat, enough to serve a feast of ravenous developers, starved from nights of toil at the desktops of the giant software factories. The author was recognized by Microsoft as a Software Legend - one of the world's top .NET experts.
Rating: - A must read for every .NET architect and developer
This is a must read for every .NET architect and developer that is doing any type of Product Line Engineering or Framework building. Component-oriented development is the heart of both and this book teaches you how to do it correctly.
Mr. Lowy has done a great job of putting everything you need to know about how to do Component-oriented development in .NET 2.0 into one place. I highly recommend this book.
Rating: - All you will ever need on .Net
This book is a must have for your collection on the study of .Net 2.0. Juval is a super resource on all subjects covered in this book and backs them up with clear examples. He is a well respected and often quoted expert in his field. I would highly recommend this book to all those who are serious about mastering the more lofty concepts of this technolgy.
Rating: - Earned a place in my back pack
I used to carry two or three books in my pack along with my laptop. Now I only carry this book. It is an outstanding resource for advanced .NET programming.
|
