Professional ASP.NET Design Patterns

I am a young professional software engineer, and I have been reading a lot of various software books lately. Coming out of college with a Computer Science degree, I really had no idea how poorly I really understood OO concepts and most of the code I was producing was very procedural in nature. Once I discovered patterns via the Gang of Four book "Design Patterns", I decided it was time to learn some real techniques. Since I was working in an ASP.Net environment, I read some reviews of this book and gave it a shot.I can easily say this is the best book I have read for software engineering yet because I have been able to incorporate so much of what the book offers. This book really has a lot of great patterns that are exactly what I needed to make my development environment more robust. Correctly learning and implementing the multitude of patterns (at each level of the architecture) and learning about various architectural designs has already paid dividends for my systems' stability, testability, and performance.One of the things I like best about this book is that all of the examples are explained very clearly, in great detail. All of the code is downloadable from the WROX site, so I was able to take a hands-on approach to learning the topic. There were a few third-party tools to download (an IoC container, NHibernate, and a mapping tool come to mind), but overall there wasn't much needed other than Visual Studio to start working (of course, all of the necessary dlls were included in the projects from the WROX site, so just using those you wouldn't need to download the third-party tools). I've found that one of the biggest challenges with other books is just getting the environment configured and that wasn't an issue here.It was also good that the author used a multitude of different technologies in the examples. For example, in discussing the implementation of the Repository pattern, ADO.Net, Entities Framework, and NHibernate are all shown as options throughout the book. In discussing the presentation layer, MVP, MVC, and a couple other patterns are discussed, with MVC showing off .Net 4.0's MVC.I would highly recommend this to any professional looking to learn enterprise patterns. Even if you've read the GoF book "Design Patterns", this is excellent because it covers many new patterns that have arisen in the nearly 20 years since that book was first published.

Let me start by saying that while I was reading this book I had many moments where I thought, "he's explained the concept well, but how would you ACTUALLY write the code for that" and then BAM! there's the code example! Really enjoyed this book, it definitely pulls in a lot of concepts, but Scott does a great job explaining how to use various "Gang of Four" design patterns in a REAL application. The early chapters provide a concise summary of the major design patterns, along with some tips and advice on when and how to use them, which I found very helpful. The later chapters Scott walks us through the development of an ASP.NET MVC e-Commerce application, explaining and showing with code how to apply the patterns learned in the earlier parts of the book.I've been developing ASP.NET Web Forms sites for over 5 years, and more recently started doing ASP.NET MVC and I found the book to have just the right tone in terms of introductory concepts and more advanced concepts, without being overwhelming at any point. Personally, I learned a LOT from reading this book, and I have a feeling I'll be re-reading it quite a few more times to fully grasp some of the concepts, and I'll be keeping it handy as a reference as well.I have had conversations with Scott over twitter and I have posted several questions on the Wrox forum, which Scott seems to do a great job monitoring and responding to, which is MUCH APPRECIATED!Bottom line, if you've been doing .NET development for a few years, this book is a MUST HAVE in my opinion. It might be a tad too advanced if you're not familiar with basic OOP principles, but definitely put it on your wishlist :)

Scott did a great job by using examples to show how to design a great flexible, maintainable, and scalable enterprise software.The book serves as a reference point to decide on what design patterns to use in a given situation and introduces the use of NHibernate, StructureMap, AutoMapper.

If you downloaded the code for the book, there are a few things of which you should be aware. Most of the code was created in VS2008 SP1 (with Framework 3.5) though some later chapters also use VS2010. In addition you need to assure MVC 1.0 is setup for VS2008 in order to run some of the "VS2008" solutions. I had no problems with VS2010 for any of the solutions targeting it. In addition, if there is a "user interface" project in a solution, assure it is the startup project before you run the example. One of the earlier chapters had an incorrect name for one of methods run when the "withdrawal" button is clicked. To correct, go to the code behind select the "Withdraw" method and add "al" to the name of the method.One of the earlier projects had trouble finding the data base filename because a full path was specified for it instead of using the "|Data Directory|" prefix to the mdf file under the App_Data subdirectory. There were at least four places in the solution where the full path was used. You also need to have a local instance of SQLEXPRESS installed and running. I used SQL Server 2008 R2 SQLEXPRESS.For the solutions with unit tests, I installed the latest version of NUnit and set it to run within VS2008 using the External Tools option. If done successfully, "NUnit" should show up under the Tools menu. Click "NUnit" and open the test project assembly you want to run the tests for.