Summary

Adequate security is important to the success of any enterprise application. With the ever-increasing threat of corporate espionage and Web site hacking, more corporations and government agencies are looking closely at the security services that enterprise solutions offer. The .NET Framework provides security services that have been virtually nonexistent on many platforms such as Windows 98. Such security services make it fairly painless to implement the important authentication, authorization, and encryption services long needed by enterprise applications.

Authentication is the bare minimum form of security that an enterprise application can afford. Windows, Forms, and Passport Authentication all provide an easy method of determining whether a particular user should have access to an application and its data.

Authorization in the form of role-based and code access security work well together to limit how users interact with enterprise data and services. Rather than a simple approved or disapproved login, applications can take control of what interacts with the user. Furthermore, network administrators are now able to decide the resources that applications should be able to access.

Finally, when building applications that store or exchange sensitive data, maintaining privacy must be a primary concern. Hashing and encryption help ensure that information such as passwords and credit card numbers remain private. The .NET Framework provides several classes that simplify the hashing and encryption of data.

The next chapter wraps up the development of an enterprise application by presenting the deployment project. Deploying Web, desktop, and mobile applications is significantly easier with the help of the Visual Studio .NET environment. A functional and user-friendly application setup adds a polished and professional look to an application and helps to ensure that user configurations are consistent.