.NET Architecture and Framework

Every once in a while, you find someone who speaks your language...or, at the very least, seems to have something very useful to tell you at just the right time. I've already mentioned Pavel Tsatsouline and his work on strength training (see the web log entry “The Evil Russian”). Ken Wilber is another person whose work never ceases to amaze and inspire me (you can find out more about him at Shambhala Publications).

A few years ago, I found an author writing about Visual Basic Business Objects named Rockford Lhotka. At the time, he was writing for Wrox Books. That publisher has since gone out of business, and some of the best authors have been signed up by Author's Press. Fortunately, Rocky Lhotka is one of the chosen few.

His most recent book, Expert One-on-One Visual Basic .NET Business Objects, was available at the Kitchener Chapters store last night. I purchased it, even though it is very expensive ($90 Cdn), simply because his earlier books dramatically changed the way that I looked at applications development. Already, after only 50 pages, I can tell that it is a very good investment.

Architecture and frameworks is what the book is all about. This is just what I need. I have been reading voraciously about the .NET world now for months without being able to become comfortable with how to apply the theories and manuals. Lhotka brings the reader back to a broad perspective which first distinguishes physical and logical architectures and then moves on to a business object framework built on top of the infrastructure provided by Microsoft's .NET class library. The architecture is called CSLA - component-based, scalable, logical architecture and the application framework he has built to support business applications looks very impressive. This book may just be what I need to move from theory to hands-on development.