Summary

This chapter looked at challenges and approaches concerning the integration of new .NET applications with existing legacy applications. You saw that there are different types of communication involved, including synchronous, asynchronous, and message-based. This chapter also outlined the impacts of security and the role it plays in enterprise integration. Furthermore, you took a close look at specific integration methods , including direct database access, application programming interfaces, document exchange, and messaging adapters. You looked at how data is transformed from a source data field to a destination data field using XSLT. Finally, you took all of this information and applied it by building an integration platform capable of reading data from a CSV file, from an XML file, or from a database table.

Every integration project has its own set of challenges. You will find that different integration methods will work best with different applications. What is most important is to fully understand the integration requirements, exactly what data is moved to where, what the access permissions are, how frequently should the data be moved, how the data should be transformed, and how to handle errors that might appear. With a clear understanding of the requirements, picking the appropriate integration approach will be much easier.

In the next chapter, you will learn about to the security and cryptography services provided by the .NET Framework. You will use these services to implement user -level and code-level security within an application. A detailed look at encryption reveals methods for scrambling data into an unreadable format that is secure for transmission over the Internet.