A .NET Scenario

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[oR]

Describing the parts of .NET separately can help in understanding the trees of this technology initiative. The best way to get a view of the forest, however, is to see how these parts work together. To do this, see Figure 1-8. It shows how various .NET technologies might be used to construct an e-commerce Web site.

Figure 1-8. An e-commerce Web site might use many .NET technologies.

An example can illustrate how various .NET technologies interact

This site is built around an ordering application that lets a user place an order from her browser. The site might sell books or CDs or toys or anything else that's available on the Internet. This site relies on Passport for authentication, so the user contacts this part of .NET My Services to obtain a way to identify herself reliably (step 1). (It's worth pointing out that using Passport authentication for a Web site built using the .NET Framework isn't required, but rather it is just one of several available options.) Next, she uses her browser to access the appropriate pages in the ordering application, a .NET Framework application built, say, in C# using ASP.NET and relying on SQL Server for storage (step 2). If this customer allows it, the ordering application can access .NET My Services to acquire information about her, such as her credit card number and mailing address (step 3). Next, the ordering application communicates with a separate shipping application across an intranet. This shipping application might be built on a non-Windows system, such as Linux, so BizTalk Server provides the glue between these disparate applications (step 4). Finally, the ordering application uses SOAP to communicate with a billing application, also across the intranet (step 5). Given that Web services are supported by many different vendors, this billing application might be a .NET Framework application or something else, such as an application written using Java running on an IBM mainframe. In either case, the same technologies SOAP and XML can potentially be used to interact with it.

The broad set of technologies grouped under the .NET banner can be applied in many different ways. The e-commerce Web site shown here provides a good example of how they might be used, but there are plenty of other choices. Depending on the problem to be solved, different .NET technologies can be combined with one another and with other technologies as needed.

The .NET technologies address a broad set of problems

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