Overall Good Reading

As one would say that mere coders think in terms of ad-hoc one time solutions while developers and software engineers think how to incorporate these best practices in the form of an application framework. Xin Chen has done a good job explaining big picture thinking i.e. how a set of libraries or classes that are used to implement the standard structure of an application are made to collaborate in the form of a reusable framework.

I'm personally a big fan of application frameworks which provide extensibility along with good foundation support for example Rocky Lhotka's CSLA (Component-based Scalable Logical Architecture). Xin Chen does the similar job building one chapter at a time. He is walking the reader through step by step building of the framework and keeping the big picture in sight. The book is divided into 15 chapters in which Xin elaborates on application frameworks, dissect them, discusses class factories, caching, configuration, windows services, message queuing, authorization, authentication, cryptography, transaction, document layer and work flow services. The author has high degree of familiarity with GOF design patterns so reader will see the degree of reusability and patterns & practices in action. Application event logging and exception handling is an inherent part of any application framework however I was disappointed to see not much discussion about it in the book. Also, during the discussion of real world business problems, author did not discuss rules engines or provide guidance about integrating dynamic logic into your framework which I strongly feel should be an integral part of an enterprise level architecture. The current business models as we know them thrive on change and we cannot isolate development designs from user's needs.

Having said that, if you are looking to build a large amount of reusable code into a framework to save development time for yourself and fellow colleagues / developers, this book will provide you enough good pointers for this purpose. Author recognizes that the frameworks cannot be built in the air and hence provided us with concrete examples. I'll also recommend reading "GOF Design Patterns", Rocky Lhotka's "CSLA.NET 2.0 (Expert C# Business Objects)" and "Framework Design Guidelines: Conventions, Idioms, and Patterns for Reusable .NET Libraries" along with this if you are serious about developing application frameworks for your enterprise.

Other Reviews

• Useful book!
• Very helpfull
• Interesting
• Overall Good Reading