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Best Architecture Practices

By Larry O'Brien

May 15, 2003 — (Page 1 of 2)
The defining characteristic of the .NET Framework is a unified programming model wiping away the barriers between programming languages and application types. There are no black boxes preventing a person with a Visual Basic background from using VB.NET to write a grid computing application; there are no tool limitations to prevent a C++ programmer from dragging and dropping 200 widgets on a form and pressing "Go!" That's one of the best things to happen for programmers in a long time-every .NET programmer is free (at least at a technical level) to explore that niche of the software development world that is most rewarding for them, creatively and financially. There is, however, considerable risk associated with this model.

While it's nice not to have arbitrary barriers between application types, different types of applications do require different approaches. One rarely thinks about conversational state between objects in a local application; one obsesses over it when designing an enterprise-scale system. Resource starvation is not on the radar screen of most Web programmers, but someone developing for a smart phone would be foolish not to address it from day one.

More accurately, these are not issues of design, but issues of architecture.

"Architecture" is one of the most overused words in the technical field, but when I say "software architecture," I mean "the unifying technical principles by which a program or system is organized." Something more than design, but still concrete enough to guide decisions at the code level.

Bill Gates is "chief software architect," proof enough that Microsoft has traditionally taken a higher-level view of architecture. I don't know what Bill Gates' workday is like, but I'm fairly sure it doesn't involve riding shotgun on the component structures in Office.

In contrast, you can't spill a latte at a Santa Clara Starbucks without scalding a "Java architect" (of course, the latte was poured by someone still carrying his "VP of business development" business cards).

Microsoft's view is changing though, with the realization that .NET gives everyone enough rope to hang themselves, and those who do may very well mistake domain constraints with faults in the .NET implementation. To battle this, Microsoft has created two new excellent resources onhttp://msdn.microsoft.com: /architectureand/practices.

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