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We want you, the reader, to use this book to inspire you. It is intended to show techniques available to you through Microsoft technologies, and also to demonstrate that you can build great applications on the Microsoft platform these days.
The book gives an overview of the important parts of an enterprise application and shows some best practices that we have learned over the years for designing such an application. Design is always key to a successful project.
Since the book is focused on design, we do not dive deep into the specifics of enterprise applications. There are other books for that. Instead this book tries to be a bridge between the architect/designer and the developer. Use this book to find the topics that are important to a certain part of an application, and then continue dissecting that area.
The following is a chapter-by-chapter overview of the book.
Chapter 1 is a general introduction to a few important topics associated with enterprise application design and development. Here we give you an overview of enterprise application integration (EAI), Unified Modeling Language (UML), and Object Role Modeling (ORM).
In this chapter, we show you what kind of software is available from Microsoft, enabling you to build a good platform for your application. We cover the operating systems and the .NET Enterprise Servers, and see how they fit into the design of an enterprise application.
Here we give an overview of the two techniques Windows offers that make it possible to cluster servers. Network Load Balancing (NLB) and Microsoft Cluster Service (MSCS) are integrated in the Windows Server family and used to enhance scalability, reliability, and availability.
We also take a closer look at Application Center, which is a .NET Enterprise Server. This server helps you manage your clusters in an easier way.
This chapter dives deeper into the Windows Server operating systems. We show you the Windows architecture and how you can use NLB and MSCS with your platform. We also include a discussion about security in Windows.
Chapter 5 looks at the enterprise application itself. We discuss how you can, and should, design it, as well as many other topics vital to the design phase.
Everybody has heard about Web services. If you have not, or simply want to know more, this is the place to look. Here we cover design and security issues, and we also discuss when you should use Web services and when you should use .NET Remoting instead.
In this chapter, we dissect Internet Information Services (IIS). We show its architecture, how ASP.NET is used, and how to tune and secure IIS.
Data storage is important in all enterprises. You need to have a well-thought-out storage policy in place so you can reduce cost and double work. Here we show you how you can consolidate your data by designing your data storage properly.
We also cover SQL Server's architecture, performance, and security in this chapter.
Here we bring it all together. We show you how we would design an enterprise application using the tips and tricks we present in this book. The application we demonstrate how to build in this chapter is a time reporting application for a large enterprise.
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