Planning Application Development

Building an enterprise application involves several steps. Chapter 1, "Introducing .NET and Enterprise Architecture," presents many of the specifics, especially with the types of documents you need to produce in preparation. Regardless of the specific documents you choose to implement, bear in mind two fundamental concepts: clear planning and consistent implementation.

Clear application planning is required so that everyone on the development team is working toward the same goal. The entire team must understand the application functionality. This is typically reflected within a business requirements document, user interface definition, and database schema definition. In addition to these fundamental documents, a high-level application design, a component-level design, and even individual class definitions are helpful, especially when parts of the application development will be outsourced to a different team.

Consistent implementation at the application level and the code level is just as important to the finished product. From the application level, it is important to take a close look the application's basic functionality. Try to identify areas of reuse that might be packaged into components . Also, applying style templates at the forms level will help ensure that each form is implemented consistently across the application. At the code level, specify coding guidelines for developers to follow. This should include consistent naming conventions for classes, enumerations, methods , properties, class variables , database tables, and database stored procedures. At the user interface level, this should include design templates describing how form controls must placed, which fonts must be used, and how controls should be sized .

With careful planning and a solid investment in application design, team members can work individually and make intelligent decisions that result in a great product.