>What's Covered in This Book?
This book covers the thought process behind the CSLA .NET architecture, describes the construction of the framework that supports the architecture, and demonstrates how to create Windows Forms, Web Forms, and web services applications based on business objects written using the framework.
Chapter 1 is an introduction to some of concepts surrounding distributed architectures, including logical and physical architectures, business objects, and distributed objects. >Perhaps more importantly, this chapter sets the stage, showing the thought process that resulted in the remainder of the book.
Chapter 2 takes the architecture described at the end of Chapter 1 and uses it as the starting point for a code framework that enables the goals described earlier. By the end, you'll have seen the design process for the objects that we'll implement in Chapters 4 and 5, but before that we have some other business to attend to.
Chapter 3 is a quick overview of the .NET technologies used to implement the framework and application. There are many books available that dive into the specifics of each of these technologies, but in this book my focus is on pulling them all together to show how they can each be used as part of a larger whole. In Chapter 3, I'll introduce each of the technologies, and discuss how we'll be using them throughout the remainder of the book.
Chapter 4 and Chapter 5 are all about the construction of the framework itself. If you're interested in the code behind n-Level undo, object distribution, autodeployment, and object persistence, then these are the chapters for you. In addition, they make use of some of the more advanced and interesting parts of the .NET Framework, including remoting, serialization, reflection, .NET security, Enterprise Services, strongly named assemblies, dynamically loaded assemblies, application configuration files, and more. Chapter 3 provides an overview of each of these, but in Chapters 4 and 5 we'll make use of them to create the framework.
The rest of the book then focuses on creating an application that makes use of the architecture and framework. Even if you're not particularly interested in learning all the lower-level .NET concepts from Chapters 4 and 5, you can take the framework and build applications based on it by reading Chapters 6 through 10.
In Chapter 6 we'll discuss the requirements of our sample application and create its database. We'll be using SQL Server and creating not only tables but also stored procedures in order to enable retrieval and updating of data.
In Chapter 7 we'll create the business objects for the application. This chapter really illustrates how we can use the framework to create a powerful set of business objects rapidly and easily for an application. The end result is a set of objects that not only model our business entities, but also support n-Level undo and various physical configurations that can optimize performance, scalability, security and fault tolerance, as discussed in Chapter 1.
Chapter 8 will demonstrate how to create a Windows Forms interface to our business objects. Chapter 9 will cover the creation of a Web Forms, or ASP.NET interface with comparable functionality. In Chapter 10 we'll use web services to provide a programmatic interface to our application that any SOAP client can call.
Most of this book focuses on online transaction processing (OLTP)-style applications and the object models that support those types of applications. However, for reporting or other functions that require manipulation of very large sets of data, we need to use different design patterns, and our object model requires adjustment or reworking. We'll discuss some of these issues and potential solutions in Chapter 11 .
By the end, we'll have a framework that supports object-oriented application design in a practical, pragmatic manner. The framework implements a logical model that you can deploy in various physical configurations to support Windows, web, and web-services clients optimally.
