I was recommended this book by a co-worker who had read it. I did my due diligence and read reviews on Amazon.com that all spoke of it favorably and checking out the table of contents and such, it seemed to cover things I was interested in learning about. Put simply, it seemed to be a book that would dive a little deeper into some of that patterns that Martin Fowler exposed in his
Patterns Of Enterprise Application Architecture book.
I'll get to the point - I was severely disappointed by this book. While it did continually reference Fowler's PoEAA book, it didn't really elaborate any of them moreso than the original PoEAA book does. The rare, short example that was given was always in C#, but other than that, it doesn't do much than rehash the intent of the patterns.
For example, in the Business Logic Layer section of Microsoft .NET: Architecting Applications For The Enterprise, they briefly explain what should be a part of the business logic layer and then proceed to explain four types of model for the BLL - the transaction script, the table module, the active record and the domain model. These are all gleaned right from Fowler's book and do little to elaborate on Fowler's explanations.
Furthermore, the first section of the book is a bunch of excerpts from IEEE whitepapers and a rehash of good design principles (favoring composition over inheritance, the single responsibility principle, etc.)
I think my biggest disappointment out of the book was that I didn't learn anything. Everything in the book was stuff I already knew. And as I always say... I'm far from a master programmer. It's just that much of the book is built on ideas that are covered in so many books (such as the design principles) and the part of the book that I had the most interest in - the part that dealt with organizing and writing code for enterprise systems, was really light on examples and there was no depth.
This book is really just PoEAA where the examples are specific to .NET. The only people I could possibly recommend this book to are people who haven't heard of, or read, the PoEAA book and are looking for it's NET-specific counterpart. Almost everything you find in it can be found elsewhere, covered more thoroughly.