Components and Microsoft's middleware technologies aren't magic bullets that will solve all your problems. Applications built from bad components are going to be bad applications. Analysis and design are essential to building a successful component-based solution.
In this chapter, we'll look at how to plan a distributed application, and we'll go over some of the specific planning issues that differ in a three-tier environment using Microsoft Transaction Server (MTS). You won't find a complete methodology for designing applications here, just some practical field-tested approaches.
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If you're interested in more formal processes and methodologies, additional references are provided in the bibliography.