Building a "brand new application" - WPF, ADO.NET Data Services, LINQ to Entities with .NET Framework 3.5 SP1
At the end of June I run workshops with 2 ISVs both looking to completely re-develop their applications. One is entirely VB6, the other a combination of VB6 with C++.
The beauty of "starting from scratch" with a one to two year development plan is you can take a hard look at the latest technologies from Microsoft - and there are a lot of them! As a result, both application architectures at a high level ended up looking pretty similar.
The following links should help those teams drill in further - and maybe you?
In both cases we went with .NET Framework 3.5 SP1 as our base level technology (NB: SP1 is really a feature pack)
Presentation Tier
- Rich Client for power/frequent users, typically inside the firewall with the need to be occasionally connected
- Browser Client for occasional users, typically outside the firewall
Middle Tier
- Serving both types of clients. Ability to scale out.
- Note: We ruled out LINQ to SQL in favour of LINQ to Entities - however worth saying that in both cases we only needed to support SQL Server and therefore LINQ to SQL would be a valid alternative
- LINQ to SQL has shipped and N-tier development with it is nicely covered in the documentation and in Beths posts
Data Tier
- Where we store all the data :-)
- SQL Server 2008
- Extended via SPs, Triggers and Types using TSQL or CLR integration as appropriate
Blogs (sample of the best):
P.S. Both teams will be using Visual Basic 2008 :-) I thought you would like that one...
