Once a small company established in 1975, Microsoft is one of the leading software companies in the world today. Over decades, Microsoft has been bringing new technologies to all of us. Some Microsoft products did not have a long life, whereas others became leading software products, supporting a vast number of solutions in the world for many years. Today, Microsoft delivers operating systems for servers, desktops, tablets, and phones. It has dozens of server products, such as SharePoint, BizTalk, Exchange, or SQL Server. It supports a powerful development framework, .NET, as well as development and testing tools. Its Visual Studio is one of the best Integrated Development Environments, and its Team Foundation Server covers all aspects of application lifecycle management. Most of us use applications from the Microsoft Office Suite, and many businesses have deployed Microsoft Dynamics solutions. To make a long story short, the world of Microsoft is huge.
How does an architect, especially a solutions architect, find his way in this world? Typically, architects want to use experience of other architects in the form of patterns and best practices. This book will help you navigate through the ocean of Microsoft technologies and provide guidance to select proper technologies for chosen patterns. We shall look at the patterns from an architect's point of view, focusing on major groups such as data exchange patterns or integration patterns.
This book has significantly changed since its first edition. First of all, it covers the changes that have happened since 2010; for example, new versions of all products, including major changes to the foundational software such as .NET and SQL Server. In addition to this, the second edition discusses .NET and SharePoint, which were not covered before. We also have added some related patterns, including presentation layer patterns.
Chapter 1, Solution Decision Framework, provides an approach to evaluating technologies that is used for different patterns described in the book.
Chapter 2, The .NET Framework Primer, presents an overview of the latest .NET version, and an assessment of the most notable namespaces in .NET based on their maturity, productivity, performance, and availability.
Chapter 3, The SQL Server Primer, discusses the capabilities of SQL Server and presents a typical use case.
Chapter 4, The SSIS Primer, discusses the capabilities of SQL Server Integration Services as an ETL tool and presents a typical use case.
Chapter 5, The BizTalk Server Primer, provides an introduction to the major architectural integration styles, discusses BizTalk essentials, and shows how BizTalk fits in to an integration use case.
Chapter 6, The SharePoint Server Primer, talks about SharePoint Server capabilities as a platform and presents major concepts and notions related to this.
Chapter 7, Other Microsoft Technologies, provides an overview of many Microsoft products that are last but not least; these include operating systems, Microsoft Office and Exchange, software development tools, and cloud computing.
Chapter 8, Integration Patterns and Antipatterns, presents an introduction to the major architectural integration patterns such as federated request and Publish/Subscribe, discusses the problem of guaranteed delivery, and presents use cases corresponding to different patterns.
Chapter 9, Web Services and Beyond, discuses web services, Service-Oriented Architecture, and Enterprise Service Bus.
Chapter 10, Data Exchange Patterns, continues the discussion on integration patterns started in the preceding two chapters. It talks about data synchronization and migration, ETL, multiple master synchronization, data sharing, and data federation. Most complex patterns are presented with use cases and solutions.
Chapter 11, Workflow Patterns, discusses two major types of workflows: fully automated workflows and human workflows.
Chapter 12, Presentation Layer Patterns, presents the variety of Microsoft technologies for building user interfaces and discusses the most popular architectural patterns, such as MVC, MVP, and MVVM.
Chapter 13, Conclusion, wraps up the book discussions and recaps the decision-making process.
In order to work with the code examples that accompany this book, you need to have the following software:
Windows OS:
Windows Server 2012
Windows 7 or newer
MS Servers:
SQL Server 2012 (including SSIS) or newer
BizTalk Server 2013 (including the ESB toolkit)
SharePoint Server 2013
Development tools:
Visual Studio 2012 or newer
MS SQL Server Data Tools—BI for Visual Studio 2012
Miscellaneous:
.NET 4.5 or newer
AppFabric 1.1
This book is not a tutorial on Microsoft technologies, nor does it provide code that you can copy-and-paste to your solution to make everything start working miraculously.
This book is intended to be a tool for architects who need to make a decision about the software to use for their solutions. They will also appreciate the presented solution decision framework. The book is also suitable for other IT professionals who want to get an introduction to major Microsoft products and their potential usage.
In this book, you will find a number of styles of text that distinguish between different kinds of information. Here are some examples of these styles, and an explanation of their meaning.
Code words in text, database table names, folder names, filenames, file extensions, pathnames, dummy URLs, user input, and Twitter handles are shown as follows: "The System namespace is both the root namespace for the .NET Framework and contains the basic building blocks of the .NET Framework."
A block of code is set as follows:
private static int CreateAndEnumerateList(int maxValue)
{
var list = new System.Collections.ArrayList(maxValue);
foreach (var val in Enumerable.Range(0, maxValue))
{
list.Add(val);
}
var total = 0;
foreach (int val in list) //implicit type conversion
{
total += val;
}
return total;
}Any command-line input or output is written as follows:
EsbImportUtil.exe /f:"<Path to folder with Itinerary>\ SmcOneWaySimple.xml" /c:deployed
New terms and important words are shown in bold. Words that you see on the screen, in menus or dialog boxes for example, appear in the text like this: "In order to complete the package to process all input files, we need to go back to the Control Flow tab."
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