Our sample enterprise application

So now that we have our rules of engagement, where does that leave us?

Well, we have a 100 percent pure Microsoft web technology stack, using no proprietary technologies in the browser, which supports single sign on and is built using good design principles.

So what will our enterprise application look like?

Our enterprise application will be a fairly typical .ASP . Net application with one twist. Instead of using a .ASP Web Forms application, we will be using a .ASP Model View Controller or (MVC) application.

There are good design reasons for choosing a .ASP .Net MVC application, which are as follows:

So our application will look something like this:

Our enterprise application will have a network load balancer, which will forward to two IIS servers. These in turn will use a redundant pair of application servers, which in turn will communicate with a SQL server database set up in a mirrored environment.

So that's the general architecture, but what will our enterprise application be called and what will it do?

Well, let's make it something that would be typically used within an organization, but something that wouldn't already be catered for by an off-the-shelf product. That rules out time-sheeting, for example.

Let's assume that our company makes software widgets for the software services industry. So our company would need some way of displaying what software services the company makes, as well as some way for customers to buy services on an on-going basis. There would need to be a way to identify clients, and to enable clients to stop their services at any time.

Let's call our company 'The Widget Company', and let's call our application "Widgets are always available here" or 'Waaah'!

For the purposes of this book, we will assume that the actual payment and purchasing of these widgets are handled elsewhere.

Here is a screenshot of our enterprise application Waaah:

We have a login screen, a screen that shows us all of the available products, and a screen that shows us just the products that the user has selected. (These are actually the same screen but displayed slightly differently using a filter).