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Enterprise Services with the .NET Framework: Developing Distributed Business Solutions with .NET Enterprise Services Review by W Boudville
strong declarative programming
Nagel takes us on a guided tour of what .NET has to offer the programmer. The book shows the advantages of .NET over the earlier COM approach to writing distributed code in a Microsoft environment. A key advantage being that under COM, your components had to be registered with the Registry. Whereas under .NET, this is totally unnecessary. Very nice. Interacting with the Registry has been a perennial sore point for some programmers. So under .NET, your components are, in this sense, more encapsulated and hence easier to maintain.
The virtues of writing a multitier application are explained. This is where you factor your code into 3 parts - UI, business logic and database server. (Or even more parts, depending on your circumstances.) How to do this in .NET takes up the bulk of the book. For example, the UI code shows how you might use ASP.NET to help build those components. While connecting to a database server can involve the use of ADO.NET.
The subtitle of the book refers to business solutions. An important consequence is the need for atomic transactions when using a database. So an entire chapter is devoted to showing how .NET enables this.
An important strength of .NET that emerges from the book is that it lets you do a lot of declarative programming, instead of procedural programming, to invoke components with useful functionality. The declarative effort is done by changing attributes in the XML metadata describing a component. Often, this is easier than writing a desired function by hand, and more robust against bugs.