Understanding the Importance of Software Architecture

We started writing this book in 2018. It has been five years since the publication of the first edition, and the importance of software architecture for creating enterprise applications (EAs) that attend to our customers’ needs has only grown. Besides, technology itself is evolving at a speed that is hard to follow, and for this reason, new architectural opportunities keep emerging. So, we keep saying that the more we build complex and fantastic solutions, the more we need great software architectures to build and maintain them.

We are sure that is the reason why you decided to read this new edition of the book, and this is the reason why we decided to write it. It is not only a matter of how .NET 8 is different from .NET 6, because there are other incredible books that take this approach. It is truly the purpose of delivering to the community a book that can support developers and software architects in the difficult decision of what component to use while designing a solution. For this reason, in this new edition, we have reformulated the way we present all the content.

You will find while reading the chapters of this new edition that you will be given support for understanding the fundamentals and technology topics that are unavoidable when designing enterprise applications using .NET 8, C#, and cloud computing. Most of the examples will use Microsoft Azure, but we will always present this content in a way that you are not locked into a specific cloud platform.

It is important to remind you that it is not a simple task to write about this important subject, which offers so many alternative techniques and solutions. The main objective of this book is not to build an exhaustive and never-ending list of available techniques and solutions but to show how various families of techniques are related, and how they impact, in practice, the construction of a maintainable and sustainable solution. We hope you all enjoy this new journey!

Specifically, in Chapter 1, Understanding the Importance of Software Architecture, we will discuss how the need to keep our focus on creating effective enterprise solutions continuously increases; users always need more new features in their applications. Moreover, the need to deliver frequent application versions (due to a quickly changing market) increases our obligation to have sophisticated software architecture and development techniques.

The following topics will be covered in this chapter:

• What software architecture is
• Some software development process models that may help you as a software architect
• The process for gathering the right information to design high-quality software
• Design techniques for helping in the process of development
• Cases where the requirements impact the system results

For this new edition, we have also reformulated the way we will present the case study of the book. You will find it in a single chapter, at the end of the book, where it will be easy for you to understand the whole purpose of its implementation.

The case study of this book will take you through the process of creating the software architecture for a travel agency called World Wild Travel Club (WWTravelClub). The purpose of this case study is to help you understand the theory explained in each chapter and to provide an example of how to develop an enterprise application with Azure, Azure DevOps, GitHub, C# 12, .NET 8, ASP.NET Core, and other technologies that will be introduced in this book.

By the end of this chapter, you will understand exactly what the mission of software architecture is. You will also have learned what Azure is and how to create an account on the platform. You will also have received an overview of software processes, models, and other techniques that will enable you to lead your team.