Building web solutions with ASP.NET and ADO.NET by Dino Esposito is the second book on ASP.NET I got in past few weeks. (The first one was “Programming ASP.NET” by Jessie Liberty and Dan Hurwitz.) It is advertised as “code-intensive solution-oriented book”, but I would characterize this book more like code-intensive DataGrid-oriented. The book presents only some parts of the ASP.NET and ADO.NET along with practical advise.
Dino’s book does a great job in explaining DataGrid control; gives a good overview of concurrency issues in ASP.NET applications and data provider architecture. A more appropriate title for such book would be “Elements of data-driven ASP.NET applications”.
The author doesn’t waste ink explaining basics of ASP.NET technology and jumps right into introducing data binding on various web controls. By the end of the first chapter it becomes clear that DataGrid Web Control is emerging as a lead character of this book. Chapters 2, 3 and 4 are dedicated to explaining data binding and control features of DataGrid. Then comes Chapter 5 that presents various options of organizing the code and layout in an ASP.NET application. I found this chapter useful, but inappropriate within the flow of the book. The discussion about physical design of ASP.NET application should really be independent from the discussion of DataGrid web control. I felt this chapter was even more out of place when I’ve realized that Chapter 6 continues to cover DataGrid in further detail.
In Chapter 7 the discussion moved away from DataGrid once again and focused on analysis of design choices in dealing various scenarios with disconnected web applications. In this chapter the author shown various techniques of data caching and updating the database in multi-user scenarios. I found this chapter very useful.
Chapter 8 might be interesting for people who have to deal with legacy ADO code within an ASP.NET application. This is not my case, so I’ve skipped the chapter altogether. An appendix would have been a better place for this material.
I’ve only glanced though Chapter 9 to realize that it contains pretty basic overview of web services; its high-level design and its usage with VS.NET. I don’t understand why the author has decided to include this chapter in the book. It didn’t seem to contain any “solutions”.
Chapter 10 explained the architecture of .NET data provider and guided the reader though a fairly complete example of creating a data provider for file system directory listings. Based on this chapter I would not be able to go ahead and write your own data provided for a commercial database. The key take away point from this chapter is that data provider shall be written not only by commercial DB vendors. Anyone who has data in a proprietary store may benefit from creating its own .NET data provider. The discussion lead me to ask the question when it is appropriate to create a data provider. This chapter had little to do with ASP.NET, but is a great complement to the material found in Pragmatic ADO.NET.
To summarize: Buy this book and read chapters 1, 2, 3, 4 and 6 of this book if what you’re looking for is a practical guide on DataGrid control.
Read Chapter 7 before deciding on the concurrency model. Read Chapter 10 right after you read “Pragmatic ADO.NET” to better understand .NET Data Providers.
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