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Understanding .NET: A Tutorial and Analysis
Firstly, this book doesn't attempt to act as a programming tutorial, and as a result is thin on code examples. Instead, the book takes a highly summative approach to the main technologies of the framework, broadly dividing them into: web services, the CLR and languages, the class library, data access, ASP.net and .NET my services.
Having said this, the central theme through the book is that of XML and web services, accurately reflecting their importance in the .net framework. It frustrates me how web services are often described as revolutionary, when built on technologies such as UDDI and WDSL which in turn are based on relatively mature technologies such as XML and HTTP. This book falls into the same trap of pandering to the hype surrounding web services, without really managing to convince me of what is so revolutionary about them.
The author dedicates a chapter to a summary of the main .NET languages, Visual Basic .NET, C#, and the managed extensions of C++. The author concludes that "Managed C++ adds even more complexity to an already complex language." Some may have reservations with this statement; garbage collection, interfaces, attributes and the managed types are only likely to result in less work for the developer even after a relatively short learning curve. The author appears to come out in favour of C# over the "more complex" Visual Basic. I would like to have seen some discussion on other .NET languages under development.
The chapter on the class libraries makes a relatively good job of summarising the massive .NET libraries. It's a fleeting overview of the most useful and interesting parts of the libraries. Remoting (remote method calls), reflection and the ubiquitous GUI libraries are just a few examples. This is one of the stronger sections of the book in my opinion, though this is coming from a developer's perspective.
There is a concise chapter on ADO .NET. The author acknowledges the fact that this is the latest in a long line of Microsoft data access libraries but fails to indicate why this one is better. The controversial .NET My Services is also detailed. The book doesn't really ponder the politics surrounding My Services, which is surprising as this element was always likely to be its downfall.
In parts, this book is overwhelmingly pro-Microsoft. In a particularly gushing moment, the author implies that COM was successful in its goals of interoperable component software, only failing to reach critical mass due to a failure by other vendors to support it. OMG's corba on the other hand was based on an incomplete standard, destined to failure due to Microsoft's decision not to support this 'doomed' standard. I would whole-heartedly disagree with this. Firstly, the distributed object technologies of CORBA are applicable to a different range of problems. Even overlooking the validity of this comparison, CORBA has seen massive support and is generally considered to be more successful than COM.
On a more positive note however, this book does provide isolated moments of insight. Some of the sidebars, for instance, tend to delve a little deeper, providing a little bit of the insight I was hoping to gain by reading this book. A brief look at the differences between MSIL and Java's VMs for instance led me to research further. Apparently future versions of SQL server are set to host a version of the .NET CLR natively, similarly to how Oracle 9i can run its own Java VM. For me, these insights go beyond the information which I could have picked up on any number of white-papers out there on the net.
In hindsight this book is perhaps too shallow, falling into the trap of using a barrage of acronyms and buzzwords without delving deep enough into any one topic. There is no mention of cross-language interoperability, and more importantly no mention of cross platform interoperability efforts -- which do exist. Also, even with a book so Microsoft oriented, I would expect to see either a distinct section, or at least more comments, on the pitfalls and barriers to takeup of the framework. A more critical and less Microsoft-centric text would for me have made this book more authoritative.
Table Of Contents
Preface
1. An Overview of .NET.
2. Web Services.
3. The Common Language Runtime.
4. .NET Languages.
5. The .NET Framework Class Library.
6. Accessing Data- ADO.NET.
7. Building Web Applications- ASP.NET.
8. .NET My Services.
Conclusion
You can purchase Understanding .NET: A Tutorial and Analysis from bn.com. Slashdot welcomes readers' book reviews -- to see your own review here, read the book review guidelines, then visit the submission page.
Full-text follows:
"Security is job one at Microsoft. Make sure you make secure programs, and don't let anyone see the source code. Access to source code results in insecurity as the viewer may find holes in your application that they can exploit."
Not particularly any more or less than any other Microsoft technology. In fact, if you do any Microsoft-centric work in your shop, .Net is a significant improvement over (COM | ASP | etc). If you live for cross-platform portability, you won't be using any of these anyway.
At any rate, this book does sound potentially useful. It's a year (two years?) since .NET was introduced and every .NET story here still has multiple +5 posts asking "Could someone finally explain what the hell .NET is?", each responded to by multiple +5 posts providing barely overlapping explanations. Good for karma, I guess, but so far the only value I've gotten from .NET is the KDE theme copying it.
What I'm listening to now on Pandora...
Except for the minor problem that web services are not a central theme of the .NET framework. They are there, and they are well supported, but the majority of the framework would work unchanged if they didn't exist or are not used.
Slashdot quality declines as the number of hot grits posts decreases. - Provolt's Law, Apr-09-2005
Honestly, I'm not really sure even MS knows what .NET truly is (or if they do, they were confused as to how to market it, resulting in consumer confusion and the subsequent renaming of .NET server). Is it a framework? A language? A methodology? An idealogy? Can you buy .NET in a box? Can you eat with spam? I do not like it, Sam I Am!
If you were me, you'd be good lookin'. - six string samurai
.NET is a framework that is not tied to any specific language. ANY language could be made into a .NET language. C++, C#, ASP, VB -- these are the primary languages Microsoft has chosen to use with .NET, but any language could be used. Other vendors are already releasing .NET versions of various development tools, although off the top of my head I don't remember which ones are already out or in the works, but essentially you could have PHP.NET, Delphi.NET, Java.NET (hey, it could happen), even PowerBuilder.NET (it's in the works).
"You cannot simultaneously prevent and prepare for war." -- Albert Einstein
Remember, revolutionary also means to go in circles.
/syle
.NET is language independent, platform centric.
Java is language centric, platform independent.
Also, even with a book so Microsoft oriented, I would expect to see either a distinct section, or at least more comments, on the pitfalls and barriers to takeup of the framework. A more critical and less Microsoft-centric text would for me have made this book more authoritative.
.NET, either.
Did you read the author's bio--even the short one on bn.com?
David Chappell is Principal of Chappell & Associates and the best-selling author of Understanding ActiveX and OLE (Microsoft Press, 1996) and Understanding Microsoft Windows 2000 Distributed Services (Microsoft Press, 2000). Through his keynotes, seminars, writing, and consulting, David helps IT professionals around the world understand, use, market, and make better decisions about enterprise software technologies.
He's been published by Microsoft, fer chrissakes. He makes a living as a consultant on MS technologies. You can't possibly expect him to be coolly objective about anything coming from Redmond.
Reading the author bio will often give you a clue about his or her technology bias, although it's no guarantee that the book will provide an objective perspective. I wouldn't expect Richard Stallman to write a wholly bias-free book about
This note was originally published at John Munsch weblog on January the 14th.
.NET to fail and fail badly
.NET "rebuttal" that I linked to above, "For non-profit use VS.NET can be had pretty cheaply, especially if you know anyone that is in college somewhere." Pretty cheaply? For a non-profit (that means charities, churches, universities, the hobbiest who is going to give away his work for FREE)... pretty cheaply? Wow. That is well and truly pathetic. To try and justify it, and say, oh well, you can try to scam an educational discount so it won't be so dear, is even more pathetic.
.NET commercials with William H. Gacy telling you how great it is without really ever telling you anything about it? Microsoft doesn't trust .NET to stand on its own technical merits and it knows it may go like cod-liver oil down the gullets of a lot of people who have seen how the company works behind closed doors even if it were the tech shiznit.
.NET just in case there wasn't any grassroots community who actually wanted to do it. Or maybe just in case there was and they couldn't control it.
.NET for other platforms? If those same people were working on giving us new libraries and new tools for an already existing language instead of pouring in the thousands of man hours it's going to take to build a copy of the C# compiler or a .NET version of Ant and JUnit?
Lots of reasons why I want
It's benefits a criminal organization. Not one that's been found guilty of crimes once or maybe twice, but lots and lots of times. Those crimes are many and varied, but here's just a few of them: Stac Electronics v. Microsoft, DOJ v. Microsoft, Sun v. Microsoft.
P.S. If you want to split hairs, Stac v. Microsoft isn't a criminal action, it's doesn't stem from a criminal abuse of their monopoly like the other two cases. Instead it was just a case of a small company being driven out of business by willful patent infringement, theft of trade secrets, etc.
Microsoft isn't just one thing anymore. It's too damn big for that. I'm sure even Bill himself knows better than to think that he truly controls the whole ship because it's become big enough that he can't possibly know all the projects, people, etc. anymore. But even a really large company still has a kind of collective personality that it exudes and a large part of the personality both internal and external to Microsoft for many years now is that of a total control freak.
If they don't own it, if they don't control it, if they didn't create it, if it doesn't have a broad stamp from Microsoft on it, then they don't want it. Sometimes it's sufficient for the thing to merely exist and they'll refuse to acknowledge it, other times they need to actively stamp it out because they can't control it.
When was the last time you can remember Microsoft saying they supported a standard? That is, not something they invented and submitted a RFC for, an actual, take it off the shelf and re-implement it without renaming it or "improving" it so it doesn't work with anybody else standard. C++? Basic? HTML? A video or audio codec? Java? Anything?
I'm sure there's something, somebody will point out their excellent support for TCP/IP or something and I'm sure that's true. But if you were to look at Microsoft as a person in your life, you'd wonder what was wrong with him or her such that so much had to be controlled by that person.
When your business is selling the operating systems that 90+% of everybody uses, software development tools should not be a profit center.
Why should I have to plunk down a couple of thousand dollars for a "universal subscription" in order to have access to compilers and basic development information? Sun doesn't have to do that? On this point I'll quote from the
Marketing. Have you been "lucky" enough to catch one of the
So they are going to pull a page out of Intel's bum-bum-buh-bum "Intel Inside" playbook and try to sell the brand like it's sneakers and cola. Trust us, you'll look cool if you use it, and we'll keep hammering the brand on TV so somebody who doesn't have much tech savvy in your organization will ask you if you are using it, or have plans to port to it, or whatever, even if he hasn't got a clue what "it" is in this case.
They don't trust you. They don't like what they can't control and they can't control you. They can try and they always will keep trying but ultimately you are going to see them keep trying to do things and always keep a step towards the door just so they can bolt if they have to. Want to see what I mean? Go visit GotDotNet sometime if you haven't already been there. It's the grassroots community website that Microsoft put up to support
Ever been to SourceForge? Of course you have, everybody has because that's one of the hubs of all open source projects. You can go there and get the source of thousands of cool open source projects and it really serves the community well. There's even hundreds of projects now that list C# among their programming languages. So why did Microsoft feel compelled to create their own GotDotNet Workspaces that is clearly just a ripoff of SourceForge?
A few reasons are fairly clear: First, at many of their workspaces you don't get in unless they know who you are. Ever been stopped at SourceForge and asked for a name and password to look at a project? What about download binaries or source? No? At GotDotNet you will, lots of projects are marked with a lock. Second, forget about all those messy licenses that Microsoft might not approve of, you don't need to worry your little head about BSD vs. GPL vs. LGPL. You've got the one true workspace license that you have to agree to, or else you won't be putting your project there. Lastly, well it's kind of obvious, but it's really all about control isn't it. After all, if you aren't under their thumb, that has to be a bad thing. So a SourceForge that they control is pretty much a requirement, isn't it?
It's a really sad way for a lot of people to waste a whole lot of time rebuilding that which already exists. Wouldn't the whole computing world be a lot better if there wasn't a team of people, maybe a couple of teams of people building complete copies of
In the end, we'll all just be left with another way to do the exact same thing only in a different language. Lord knows the world benefits now from being unable to share media between France, Germany, Italy, Spain, the US, and Japan because we can't all speak the same language. I benefit every day from the fact that I can't read a Japanese manga I might enjoy or understand a TV show from Europe. Once you are done building this tower, go build a few more right beside it using Perl, Python, and Ruby too. They're all trailing behind in certain areas, we need to make sure the same set of stuff is reinvented and rewritten for all of them too.
.NET locks your applications up onto a particular platform (arguable, since Mono does do ASP.Net, and a lot of the stuff is either currently ECMA and IEEE certified, or on track to be.)
.NET doesn't do though is lock your data up on a particular platform. As long as you have SOAP libraries for other platforms/languages you can easily mix and match heterogenous systems.
What
Frankly .NET is all about making it easier for the developer. The .NET Framework is there to make tedious tasks easier. Of course this is all made easier by the use of M$ tools Visual Studio.NET. Without that GUI .NET is a little harder to work with.
.NET but I found Professional ASP.NET a usefull book in teaching me about the framework and ASP.NET. I am planning on porting over my site MediaGab as soon as my hosting company supports it.
ASP.NET makes it easier on developers as well. Traditional ASP, otherwise known as "Spagetti code" was all intermixed with HTML. Now you can write your scripts in a separate file and have your controls reference the code. Also there is a whole ASP.NET community, kind of like open source, which develops controls that you plug into your VS.NET and then are able to take advantage of this new functionality by dragging the control onto your page and setting some properties.
I am still in the "learning curve" of