Buy it at Amazon
Read a Sample Chapter From The Publisher
| Author | Tom Barnaby |
| Publisher | APress |
| Length | 528 pages |
| vbRad Rating: | 4 fingers up. (4 out of 5) |
| Reviewed by | Robert |
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Distributed .NET Programming in C#
Buy it at Amazon Read a Sample Chapter From The Publisher |
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Distributed .NET Programming in VB.NET
Buy it at Amazon Read a Sample Chapter From The Publisher |
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Note: Both books are essentially the same with obvious differences. The review is for the C# brother.
Despite the name of the book, it explores more than just Distributed computing, even though it is the underlying theme. I loved the first chapter which charts the evolution of distributed programming, but more importantly, shows the reader how to do and not to do distributed projects. This was important to me, because I was involved in the project, which due to company politics, ended up making every possible mistake, that a distributed project can. You've seen nothing until you have cross-country method calls.Thanks to the internet, distributed computing means more today than just connecting your client app to the department database. Thus, this book focuses on more than just .NET Remoting (described excellently in this book). In addition to Remoting, you'll learn about Web Services, which is really poor man's remoting. The author gives a pretty detailed overview of them.
Those in corporate IS will want to read the gigantic and super detailed chapter on COM+ and MTS. I have a bit of an issue with the entire idea of doing component services with .NET. There is a large performance penalty for doing extensive COM interop. For instance, in informal tests SqlClient.NET is about 20% than Odbc.NET, which does pInvoke. Odbc.NET, in turn, is 20% faster than the OleDb.NET provider, which does COM interop. COM+ and MTS do massive COM interop, thus negating any performance to be gained by using object pooling and other tricks. Maybe I am wrong, but someone has yet to prove it with numbers. I am guessing, Microsoft will come out with a native .NET component server shortly.
MSMQ gets a makeover with the System.Messaging wrapper. This chapter opens up a lot of possibilities compared to VB6, because the wrapper is complete as opposed to the one used with VB6.
Finally, to round out the book, Tom's boss chips in with an ADO.NET appendix that is surprisingly full of information.
Bottom line, Distributed .NET Programming in C# is an excellent read for both mid to advanced programmers. Newbies and ASP programmers (are they really programmers?) should probably start with a beginner .NET book, then move up to this one.