The Architect Role

The Architect Role

Microsoft® Visual Studio® 2005 Team System actually identifies two separate architect roles: the infrastructure architect and the application architect. On your team, this might be one person or it could be several. In practice, architects can have other roles as well. They might be project managers, lead developers, or the only developer. Regardless of a team's organization, either architect role in Visual Studio 2005 is served by the one edition: Visual Studio 2005 Team Edition for Software Architects.

So, what is an architect? When it comes to architects of this type, it can be hard to define, but here is one possible definition: an architect is someone who puts together the structure or structures of a system, whether it is a network, datacenter, or software system. One thing is for sure: architects must be experts in the areas of maintenance, performance, compatibility, and security because their guidance will affect each of these areas. In addition, architects must represent these systems using a notation that is easily understood by all users of the designs.

This chapter introduces you to the architecture support features in Team System.

NOTE
There are many layers of architecture to an enterprise-scale application. I recommend visiting the Microsoft patterns and practices Web site and downloading the Enterprise Library, which is a collection of great .NET application blocks for helping with specific architecture guidance. You can find it at msdn.microsoft.com/patterns.