The solution presented in this book is indeed flawless in execution and very impressive. The book itself is not for the faint of heart.

I find the book logically hard to follow. As an example, the Contact.aspx page is thrown into chapter 3 appears completely out of context. Furthermore, I get an exception when I try to view the page in my own learning solution developed to this point: Globals.cs declares: public static string ThemesSelectorID = ""; and BasePage.cs has string id = Globals.ThemesSelectorID;
Result - Null Exception thrown...

A much friendlier approach would have been to break down the code consecutively into the chapters so readers could follow step-by-step, and find it much easier to develop an application like this in the real world.

The book is NOT a step-by-step explanation of how to construct every line of code needed for the site. The book makes the assumption that readers already know how to make individual pages (regardless of which ASP.NET version), and the purpose of the book is twofold: to teach and demonstrate the new ASP.NET 2.0 features in the context of a real site, and to teach you how to design and implement an overall website using a modern multi-tier design methodology that is geared to leverage the new features of ASP.NET 2.0. This is an architecture and infrastructure book, and not really a tutorial on how to design web pages in general.

You must get the code download and study it to see all the source code. The book would have been huge if all the source code were covered in it's pages.

Besides, you can ask questions here if you get stumped on something. But please try to work through it first on your own because you'll learn more that way.

Eric

Well said Eric. The code is massive and redundant in many areas. Marco does cover new ideas in each chapter very well. If you only concentrate on the solution, you're missing out on 2/3 of the book.

@codewife55: From your description, I have a hunch that you're not defining namespaces in your code.

I downloaded the code and built the project with SQL 2005 Enterprise. That's how I know the code is flawless! The solution works.

I don't really expect a step-by step beginner's book, and have built several moderately complex asp.net websites. However, for intermediate people just moving to .NET 2005, it would be nice to have more of a tutoial type approach.

MythicalMe: I have indeed defined my own namespaces.

I read both books Problem – Design and Solution - ASP.NET and ASP.NET 2.0 and so far I’ve completed one internet site (http://partners.homebridge.com) , three Intranet sites on 1.0 and another Intranet on the framework 2.0 within the new book release.

My experience and advice about the reading of this book and how I did at the very beginning as newbie ASP.NET programmer was first of all have completed few previous small solutions like simple forms with some data capture and/or reporting applications based on data-grids and ado.net. To do this kind of applications I had to follow other beginner oriented books as ASP.NET: Tips, Tutorials and Code by Scott Mitchell this book is very good and its author has many other books and material available.

Anyway, after doing these applications I realized that I need to get a better coding, to use better the framework and to do a better application of OOP concepts in my applications, so I have to integrate all these concepts without expending many hours reading topic by topic trying to put everything together. Then Marco’s book appeared, indeed after having the sample application running (The Phile on book 1 and The Beer House on book 2) I looked the solutions running and after that, I took a brief look the code without any previous reading. This very first look of the code let me follow the internal flow and somehow the architecture of these sample applications, I navigated along methods calls, properties definitions, how classes inherit from other abstract classes, etc. Many questions arose and then I started my reading. In effect as reader, once you get that point, you can either to try to implement the all chapters in order or go to implement specific chapters… my advice is to try to implement a brand new solution make your own namespaces, and classes; You will have to use the book definitions but with your own names i.e. the author uses MB.TheBeerHouse.DAL so I used HB.Partners.DAL make each single piece of your application work, for sure you will experience many problems but your reading and in some cases “googlable” additional explanations will help you to go to the next chapter.

Another way of getting into the book is to make work specific chapters in different order, for instance in my new application I need go straight to a Datagridview implementation so I made work the configuration, and the logic necessary in DAL and BLL folders to get content(data) in my grid, I always preserved the architecture and I read the proper chapters before start!. After that, I made the authentication work and so on. This is a more difficult approach but applies for many programmers.

If this is your first attempt to do a .NET solution then ASP.NET problem – design –solution works also for you, but you are obligated to work hard in the sample application and to do extra reading of the concepts applied. You always will get extra help from this forum.

I'm an ASP newbie and as such the book probably isn't appropriate for me. Actually there are a group of us and we wanted to go through the book together. Learning from real world examples was very appealing to us as well as learning how to architect and designs things right from the beginning. We still plan on going through the book but may do so in concert with more of a beginning book.

What would be useful to me is a middle ground from what has been discussed in this thread. I can handle digging through code but it needs to be working code. Having a complete application really isn't that useful when what I'm trying to understand is a concept. All this could be resolved is the code to run each chapter were separated out.

Right now I'm at a standstill because I can't get the examples from the first 2 chapters to work and I need that for my own learning. Looking at the completed solution for the entire book doesn't get me the understanding I need. I would greatly appreciate anyones helps in getting me over the hump on this. I've posted a topic in the forum at http://p2p.wrox.com/topic.asp?TOPIC_ID=49931.

Maybe this could get resolved as a community. I would be happy to keep separate copies of the code for each chapter properly versioned so that each chapter could be run as a different application. At the very least it would be a good version control exercise. I would be happy to upload this code to a puplic site should it become available.

codewife55, I had the exact same error as you and had trouble finding it, but after some investigating I found a typo in web.config

/Peter

Can you elaborate on the web.config typo?

Nick Duckstein
SQLROI, Inc
[email protected]
Database Architecture, Administration, and Performance Tuning