Review By: Bill Tuccio
05/11/2004

Microsoft’s .Net environment is a combination of application development, data management, and network infrastructure. Multiple language support that can work together both on the Internet and in the back office, combined with database access (where the database can be a conventional RDBMS, an XML store, or a new SOAP standard), is a powerful set of tools in .Net. Combining these rich capabilities in the application environment with a network infrastructure creates new challenges for an IT manager as well as teams of programmers, database administrators, and network administrators.

Here, the skills of five authors combine to create a book that not only serves as an overview of .Net but also has sufficient detail and examples that one could use to set up and experiment with a development environment.

This book gives the history of Web applications and points out where room for improvement was possible. From there, the authors provide the basic principles of .Net. From basic principles the authors advance to detailed examples of programming, then to detailed database access. Database concepts logically bring one to XML and then on to object remoting, which then leads to SOAP as a data exchange method. The authors sum up with a case study and useful appendixes.

This book combines a broad overview of concepts with detailed examples. You are able to learn the limitations of current application environments, and then build upon this to find the many elements necessary to overcome these limitations using .Net. You learn the fundamental guiding principles of .Net, how the programming languages work, how .Net compares to Active Server Pages (ASP), how to access traditional databases, and then how this is extended to more advanced forms of data from XML all the way through SOAP.

The authors combine their skills to provide a detail-rich book that helps show not only the advantages but also the shortcomings of .Net. Their knowledge of existing Web, database, and network systems is used to show helpful comparisons of what exists today and what .Net provides once implemented.

I enjoyed the high-level overviews that continue right down to coding examples. The advice of the authors holds true, that only by working with the examples can one hope to fully understand the intricacies of .Net. While I did not have .Net set up as an environment and thus could not implement the examples, I know where I will begin when I have that environment available.

If you are looking for a book that helps you understand what .Net can do for your company, this is the one to get. In order to grasp its concepts, you need to have a firm handle on existing Microsoft products, including IIS, ASP, and ADO, as well as an understanding of a programming language.