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.NET-A Complete Development Cycle Review by Daniel Maharry
Not quite satisfying
It's all a question of balance. You can apply these words of wisdom to managing software development projects and to planning out the contents of a book, but it's still a tightrope that both must face. Gunther Lenz and Thomas Moeller have learnt this balance across many of their own software projects and now try to reflect their experience in this new book which, as it says on the tin, covers the complete development cycle of a .NET software project.
In almost minute detail then, we are taken inch by inch through the analysis, design, implementation, deployment, and maintenance strategies of a C# and ASP.NET photo shop application, to be found on the CD supplied with the book. And somehow, in 540 pages we manage to cover pretty much everything that would take a hobbyist coder and make him at home on a large scale structured enterprise project. Well, everything except experience and good, solid programming skills, anyway.
Chapter one is perhaps the only throwaway text, introducing .NET and Visual Studio as the IDE of choice for .NET development in case you weren't already using it. Past that however the information comes thick and fast, starting with explanations of no less than ten different development models to give us a look and feel of them all before using the Unified Process to develop the project for the rest of the book. Subsequently, we are thrown into prototyping, unit testing with NUnit, designing systems with UML, building requirements tables, using Visual Source Safe to implement a version control system, refactoring code across point releases, integrating COM modules into .NET projects, threading issues, deployment and strategies for the maintenance and upgrade of software as required. It's quite a list and there's also the complete code listing for the application thrown in.
It's nicely written and demonstrates a lot, but that's all it does really: demonstrates things. It's also a single, long case study of a near-problem-free project, but when has that ever happened save in the very smallest of developments? What this book cannot provide for is the human side of a team. Real world scenarios like losing a team member and getting negative feedback from a client are covered, but with a brevity that keeps the book moving but which few people will appreciate. Indeed, it's this brevity which is equally the book's strength and its weakness. It covers a lot of ground succinctly and well but many times you'd wish it would explain more of a topic or even just justify the assertions it has made before whisking onto the next item in its agenda. How does one debug thread-related issues for example, and why should a project's requirements be structured in XML? As you read, you may come across techniques which are new, but you'll end up looking to other references to actually comprehend and learn them well.
Books usually suffer from waffle. Ironically, it's the very opposite that lets down this otherwise solid book, with the editing making it a very clean, efficient book at the cost of a genuine feel and engagement with the reader. Like most software projects, the book does what it set out to do, but could do with some more documentation.