I really liked the book and programmed my original ASP.net project accordingly with Visual Studio.net 2003. It took me a while to fix the bugs as the code was never updated to work with VS2003.

Does anyone know any websites which can show me how to write 3 tier projects like this for asp.net 2. I really enjoyed the original book but I somehow feel that the book just leaves you and nobody ever updates the book's design patterns and code as was the case with the code not being updated for VS2003.

Where can I learn more about 3 tier programming with the latest patterns in ASP.net 2. I am really looking for resources regarding this but can't find any resources on other or MSDN site about 3 or multi tier programming. This help with large enterprise developments but I find that there aren't resources on the web for this.

Currently I am lost with looking for good way to design 3 tier asp.net 2.0 project.
My questions are:
1. Is there a type of community that share the latest ASP.net 3/multi tier design patterns.
2. Where can I find the latest resources on ASP.net 2 3/multi tier design and programming
3. Also when is the new ASP.net Prob, Design Solution book coming out for ASP.net 2?
4. How can I split a ASP.net 2 solution into multiple projects so that the same sub-projects can be reused with a windows application. Apparently .net 2 alows you to do this and I would really like to test this out.

Thanks

There's a lot of good books on design patterns, and some are specific to C# and/or vb.net. Please do some google searches. The Gang of Four book is the classic on design patterns, but it uses an odd language (I think it's Smalltalk), so it's not right for everyone. You can also get Martin Fowler's book on refactoring. Refactoring is a hot topic in VS 2005 because they've built-in some refactoring support. This is one enhancement that started in C#, but the VB.NET version goes even farther than C#.

I provided updated code for VS 2003 based on the first edition, but I am not one of the authors of the original book, and my work has not been officially sanctioned by anyone. Look in the recent messages here for a download link.

Most modern sites are using 4 tiers now (if you include the DB):
- data layer (Database: tables, stored procs, etc)
- data access layer (feeds data to BLL)
- business logic layer (business rules and functionality)
- UI layer

I posted some resources the other day: newsgroups, blogs, etc. At first the MS blogs will be over your head, but you'll learn a lot if you stick with it and read them every day.

Almost everyone uses multi-tier designs now, so you see them all over but I don't know of any books dedicated to this subject.

The second edition of this book was held up a bit pending the release of VS 2005. Unlike some books that were released before the final release of VS 2005, this book will be completely tested and verified on the final release, so it will take another couple months. Because of the internal review process it's hard to give you any specific date. But when it's released it will be impressive: it's not going to be a facelift of the first edition. Every word will be new, and you'll learn a lot about the Provider pattern, lazy loading, and most of the new functionality in ASP.NET 2.0. Marco Bellinaso is hard at work on it and he's including the new experiences he's had plus many hours of research and experimentation with the betas.

You might also want to do some research on Object/Relational Mapping (ORM). This is what the BLL does to take a relational data model from the DB and turn it into OOP objects that can be used in the UI. Marco will explain how to do this yourself in C#, but you can also find some automated tools to do this (Paul Wilson's ORMapper, NHibernate, LLBLGen Pro, etc). I agree with Marco that a custom code version is best, but I learned a lot by looking at there automated tools, and so will you. I met Paul at the Atlanta Code Camp and I was one of the biggest critics of automated ORM until after his presentation. He's extremely knowledgable and he makes a strong argument. He knows a great deal about modern system design and everyone should study this debate in order to understand the issues better. Trust me, you'll be a much better developer if you learn both sides of the automated ORM debate!

Eric

Thanks for the detailed response.

The new book will be really cool.

Any release date on the new version of the book? I enjoyed the first version very much.

Thanks.

No date yet. I don't think it's completely done yet, but it's probably going to be complete sometime in February, and then they have to go through a final review process (I'm not sure how long that takes), and then they release it to manufacturing. It might be May before it hits the shelves (just a wild and crazy guess).

Here's a link to Marco's blog. He'll post info about the second edition of this book occasionally:

http://www.dotnet2themax.com/blogs/mbellinaso/