----- Original Message -----
From: "John Sands" <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>
Sent: Friday, April 19, 2002 11:06
Subject: Re: Can someone recommend an ADO.NET book
> "now I just try to avoid the 'red' part of the bookstore shelves!"
>
> I agree; but there are exceptions. I have Michael Kay's XSLT book on my
desk
> right now and it is one of the best technical books I've ever read. (Right
up
> there with The Perl Cookbook and anything by Richter.)
>
Grimes on COM/ATL is pretty good; it and ATL internals are all you need for
ATL work.
I was in Borders last week browsing the aisles (up in oregon, as large
enclosed bookstore is a good place to take a baby for walk in a pushchain in
the rain, see), and looked at a couple of the new Wrox books
-Professional Web Services in Java
-Enterprise C# or something like that
The Pro web services book suffers from the problem that all such books have
to date; they are blissfully naiive when it comes to getting the stuff
working. So even though it seemed to look at the technical aspects quite
broadly, it isnt enough. Indeed, all the books so far seem to make you think
that because SOAP makes creating/consuming web services easy, all you need
to understand are the APIs and you are sorted.
I have yet to see a 'Production Web Services' book which starts "Assuming
you know about how to write a web service using
{ASP.NET,C#,Axis,Perl::Soap,gSoap, whatever}", here is how to get that out
the door. First we will start with how to architect a service for
robustness, scalability and transactional safety..."
I thought the book on enterprise C# was OK. As an example, they got into
writing management stuff (why do you you have to write an MMC plug in BTW,
cant there be a generic one that just uses introspection to let you manage
,net apps?), and things like that. I liked their example of 'adding a
session' to a service, not by adding a session parameter, but a) by adding a
SOAP header (i.e. they've read the soap spec) and b) using an attribute to
provide the session stuff as an aspect to the service. [NB.their session
code wont work against callers from AOL whose IP addr can change from call
to call; you cant use IP addr verifications against that domain]
The enterprise C# book was written by two people, which I think makes a
difference. you can do depth, coherence and consistency with a few authors.
Once you have many writers doing 1-2 chapters, even if the chapters
themselves are very good, it is hard to bring the stuff together into a
coherent whole. It's just like any other s/w project really: throw more
people at it and it comes out the door faster, but the implementation
reflects the team dynamics. One-two person apps are tighter than big team
apps.
-Steve
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