This is a good book. It is definitely more of a design book than a programming book (as the title says). A good developer has books like this in his or her library though.
Unfortunately, Jimmy's writing is very hard to follow at times. English may be his second language, and it shows. Next time get a better editor -- a very poor job of editing the book was done. Some sentences just run on forever and use a bunch of unneccesary words. This may sound picky, but this type of book is read through entirely and it should be better written and organized.
I do really like how Jimmy expores different design possibilites. He gives the pros and cons of each option, including the one he proposes. He obviously understands the technologies very well and has much real-world experience. You can tell he is an experienced developer.
So remember, this is an enterprise design book. If you follow his proposal you will have an application with many layers/tiers that also makes use of COM+ / component services. For smaller applications this type of design is usually overkill. But for very large applications a good design is critical.
Good book.

This book should have been entitled "Design of Enterprise Systems with emphasis on Stored Procedures". It really has little to do with VisualBasic or .NET, and more to do with proper large application design in the OO/SQL era.
The author is obviously obsessed with Stored Procedures and makes a very good case for using them. In his systems, every application deals only with stored procedures and never performs SQL statements directly. Well, that's one way of doing it, but it introduces a whole lot of problems that were never really discussed too clearly.
The book is an excellent resource not just for the theory but for practical code snippets you can [take] and use in your next huge, huge enterprise application.
I say "huge, huge", because the sheer amount of overhead you will create in developing any applications based on this architecture is astounding. For anyone who started programming in COBOL, welcome to the world of Microsoft object-oriented programming! You will be spending 90% of your time worrying about coding things that have absolutely nothing to do with the application! Do we really want our application subject matter experts to have to worry about Shared Properties Managers, Object Construction, Threads, Object Pooling? Well, we have no choice if we go with .NET under Microsoft.

If you've stepped away from VisualBasic for a couple of years, welcome back to the new world of Microsoft's vision for a single language with many names. They call it VisualBasic now, but it's just C wearing a mask. Forget about rapid coding. Forget about type-independence. Forget about functions and subroutines. You're going to be spending most of your time memorizing the wall chart of COM objects and trying to learn yet another incarnation of VB that is as incompatible with the previous version as Java is with Fortran.
Don't believe me? OK, use Visual Studio.NET to write a simple application that looks up a record in a table and says "Hello World".
But I digress. The book's treatment of error handling, trace logging, concurrency locking, and other oft-neglected issues is very good and gives practical advice on how to do it. I will personally implement many of his suggestions. Many others I will pare down into a more manageable architecture for a company that does not have a multi-million dollar IPO worth of cash to burn through in the next 12 months.
His critical analysis at the end of each chapter of the proposal presented in that chapter, on the basis of performance, scalability, portability, maintainability, reusability, testability, debuggability, interoperability, and other "ities" was very clever. I will use that, as well as "codability", "readability", "longevity", and "learning curve" to help evaluate what language I want to use in my next application. It might show an MS OO language to be the worst choice. Who knows?
2 pet peeves:
1. "Preventive" is the correct word. There is no such thing as "Preventative", because we do not preventate things. Wonder how that slipped past the spell checker that SURELY every writer nowadays has.
2. "Errand" is running to the store to get something. "Errant" is something that has gone wrong. The entire sample application is built on a misuse of the word "Errand". But I forgive Jimmy because he is Swedish, and if I had to write a technical book in any of my 2nd languages, I would be hard pressed to get absolutely everything right.
Good job, Jimmy.

If you are looking for a book that gives you a blueprint for building a scalable enterprise database application using the .NET framework and SQL Server 2000 then this book hands it to you on a plate.
Don't buy this book if you are looking to learn Visual Basic .NET or SQL Server because this one is all about applying those basic skills taught in other books to produce a "real" application.
Most books on this subject fit the 80:20 rule, they take you 80% of the way and then ask you to just finish things off yourself. Anyone who is familiar with the 80:20 rule knows that the remaining 20% needed for completion is as much effort again as the first 80%.
This one introduces, designs and builds a real application to completion, consisting of n-Tier architecture with full transaction control, business rules and data access with concurrency control. It doesn't ignore real world requirements such as performance, debugging and testing.
The author imparts tips and tricks learned over the years and gives you a working example of one of the most important design patterns in database access, "Batch Command" (sometimes referred to as "Unit of Work"). This pattern minimises multiple trips to the database by compiling separate SQL statements into a single script that is send and executed in a single call. All code examples are in VB.NET and are accompanied by UML diagrams where appropriate.
In summary this book fits hand in hand with Microsoft's .NET data access strategy and basically hands you the design, implementation notes and source code of a working, scalable, enterprise class application on a plate.

Well worth it!