Book Review – Microsoft .NET: Architecting Applications for the Enterprise

For the entire month of January, I am doing the Daddy Day Care thing for our 4 month old twins.  Since I can’t really work during this time, I figured that it would be a good chance to catch up on some reading that I have been putting off.

This book does a fantastic job of explaining common industry architecture patterns and practices in the context of .NET technologies.  The book was well organized and flowed as the reader is led through the process of designing a multi-tier architecture.  From inversion of control to invariants, domain driven design to dependency injection, mocking to model view controller; this book explains it all.

I really like that the writers explained the various patterns without showing preference to any one specific methodology.  The pros and cons of using the various industry approaches were shown for each of the primary.NET delivery technologies (MVC, Web Forms, Windows Forms, WPF, Silverlight).  They maintained an objective stance and I think that is important in a reference book like this.

The book consistently references classics like Martin Fowler’s Patterns of Enterprise Architecture and Eric Evans’s Domain Driven Design.  It highlights the topics discussed in those references and shows how to apply them to .NET architectures.  While not a deep reference material, this book is a great pocket reference for various design fundamentals.  Anybody interesting in learning, or honing, the application of solid design fundamentals should definitely take a look at this book.

Comments

• Anonymous
  January 05, 2011
  I agree, it's one of my favourite books. Dino does a great job. It's so good I almost bought a second copy when I temporarily misplaced mine.