The Structure of This Book

The purpose of this book is to outline the best practices for building a scalable enterprise application. Each chapter builds a small piece of an entire application. Rather than reference the same old sample applications that are bundled with the .NET Framework, such as Duwamish, Fitch & Mather Stocks, or Northwind, this book works toward building an enterprise application from the ground up. Each chapter focuses on a specific area of application development. You can read this book from one chapter to the next or selectively reference chapters for specific examples that match problems you might be facing .

Chapter 1, "Introducing .NET and Enterprise Architecture," sets the foundation for the book by defining an enterprise application and business processes. The chapter also briefly outlines the important stages of application development from requirements gathering to application deployment.

Chapter 2, "Accessing Data in ADO.NET," dives into the most important element of an application, the database. This chapter leads off with a review of ADO.NET and follows up with the implementation of a structured data access layer. This chapter also highlights the importance of business objects and how they can effectively insulate an application from changes to a data model.

Chapter 3, "Using Networking and Directory Services," introduces directory services, explains how they work, and shows how corporate enterprises use them to manage user accounts. This chapter introduces Active Directory, Microsoft's directory service solution, to build out a directory services business service that fits cleanly into the application framework and interacts with application business objects.

Chapter 4, "Applying Reliable Messaging," adds real-time messaging services to the application and explains how they can be leveraged to build out a scalable business tier based on asynchronous communication. This includes creating messages and queues that implement a framework for building out a sample distributed analysis engine.

Chapter 5, "Integrating Mail Services," presents e-mail services within the .NET Framework, including how they work, how enterprises applications use them, and how they can facilitate online collaboration between the users and the application. This chapter implements a messaging service that fits cleanly into the application framework and interacts with application business objects.

Chapter 6, "Automating Business Processes," takes a close look at business process automation and how it can be quickly added to an enterprise application with the help of Microsoft BizTalk Server. BizTalk provides tools that simplify process definitions that can span across multiple applications and execute for weeks. You can implement these processes using either the built-in BizTalk tools or the .NET managed code that is plugged in as an integration component.

Chapter 7, "Building Web Applications," implements the application's presentation layer with the use of Web forms, reflection, and data binding. The presentation layer finally adds the user interface to all of the services covered so far and relies upon templates and user controls to reduce errors and encourage reusability.

Chapter 8, "Developing Desktop Applications," implements an enterprise presentation layer as a desktop application. Desktop applications have different strengths and weaknesses when compared to Web applications. One thing both have in common, however, is the need for a structured development framework that minimizes errors and encourages reuse. The next chapter presents a framework for rapid application development that incorporates forms inheritance, user controls, application configuration files, and dynamic access to assemblies.

Chapter 9, "Using XML and Web Services," exposes to more details related to Extensible Markup Language (XML) and Web services. First, this chapter reviews what XML is and presents how it works. Second, the chapter shows how these concepts are broadened and used to create Web services that expose enterprise application functionality.

Chapter 10, "Integrating Reporting Services," describes the reporting services integrated with the Visual Studio .NET environment. The chapter begins with an overview of reporting and then breaks down the report-building steps. It covers everything necessary to build a typical enterprise report.

Chapter 11, "Deploying .NET Applications on Wireless Devices," takes the .NET Framework on the road and explores mobile application development. It covers developing mobile applications for two types of mobile applications: Compact Framework applications for Personal Digital Assistant (PDA) devices and Mobile Internet Toolkit applications for Web-enabled cellular phones. Both frameworks add mobile capabilities to the enterprise application.

Chapter 12, "Integrating .NET Applications," introduces application integration, .NET style. An introduction to application integration describes the value in interfacing existing applications with new .NET applications. Then, it shows how to assemble a new integration platform that puts XML, XSL Transformations (XSLT), and remoting to work.

Chapter 13, "Understanding .NET Security and Cryptography," exposes 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.

Chapter 14, "Installing .NET Applications," wraps up the development of an enterprise application by presenting the deployment project. Deploying Web, desktop, and mobile applications is made 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 ensure that user configurations are consistent.

Each chapter describes the technology as it relates to the .NET Framework and provides examples for applying it within the scope of an enterprise application. Although the examples are applied to the IssueTracker sample application, they are flexible enough to be applied to just about any business application.