'Expert C# Business Objects' by Rockford Lhotka Some ideas are perhaps better left as neat ideas and not implemented. It may be that the concept of business objects described in this book is one such idea. Business objects are, to use Mr Lhotka's phrase, 'intelligent data', which can move around networked systems.

The business objects are a package of data and code to manipulate that data, and are capable of migrating, via Microsoft's .NET marshalling system, from one machine to another, depending where they logically fit at any stage in the process's lifetime.

The book uses as an example the development of a framework to handle business objects, and anyone using this book will get a fairly good grounding in some key .NET technologies - remoting, Windows forms, and web forms for instance. This, in itself is a useful thing, so why am I doubtful about the overall thrust of the book?

I can answer that in one word. Debugging. How do you debug code which moves around different physical and logical machines and operating environments? Significantly, there is no sustained discussion of the issue or development of suitable tools in the book, and to my mind this is a fatal flaw.

Alan Lenton
22 July 2006

'Expert C# Business Objects' by Rockford Lhotka
1-59059-344-8
Apress, 815pp @ £32.56

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