Microsoft® .NET: Architecting Applications for the Enterprise

This book seemed really promising from the title and mainly its author (Dino Esposito), who is one of the best .NET writers out there. It took me a while to buy it though, because for weeks I tried in vain to find its table of contents, to know exactly what I was buying. Having failed at finding one, I decided to just take a chance and buy it anyway, and I don't regret, it is a good book.

I would say the target audience is intermediate to senior developers who are getting into software architecture, or architects who work on a database-centric way and want to get an update to the current buzzwords, such as domain model pattern, repositories, services, AOP, POCO, OR/M, DDD etc. This book does not try to be a definitive source on any of those topics, but more like an introduction and a reference; the authors make a good job at pointing for resources for those who want to get more dense information.

Books like Martin Fowler's "Patterns of Enterprise Application Architecture", the GoF classic Design Patterns book and Eric Evan's "Domain-Driven Design" are mentioned dozens of times, so people who have already read those books may not have lots of new stuff to see here, unless they are looking for a lighter reference or want to see how some of those ideas can be applied on .NET.