patterns & practices: Guides

Guides consist of written guidance, either online or printed, which you can read to get a detailed understanding of technical problem domains and engineering practices. patterns & practices Guides cover topics that include patterns, application architecture, integration, performance, and security.

Visual Studio Team System

Guides

Microsoft ESB Guidance for BizTalk Server 2006 R2
Guidance, components, and frameworks demonstrating how to develop an Enterprise Service Bus (ESB) on the Microsoft platform, using Microsoft BizTalk Server 2006 R2, and how to extend your existing messaging and integration solutions.

New Book: I. M. Wright's "Hard Code"
Get the brutal truth about coding, testing, and project management—from a Microsoft insider who tells it like it is.

patterns & practices Team Development with Visual Studio Team Foundation Server
This guide shows you how to make the most of Team Foundation Server. It starts with the end in mind, but shows you how to incrementally adopt TFS for your organization. It's a collaborative effort between patterns & practices, Team System team members, and industry experts.

patterns & practices Performance Testing Guidance for Web Applications
This guide shows you an end-to-end approach for implementing performance testing. Whether you are new to performance testing, or looking for ways to improve your current performance testing approach, you will find insights that you can tailor for your specific scenarios.

Knowledge Bases

patterns & practices Visual Studio Team System Guidance Wiki
The purpose of this project is to build some insightful and practical guidance around using Microsoft Visual Studio Team System. It's a collaborative effort between patterns & practices, Team System team members, and industry experts.

patterns & practices Performance Testing Guidance Wiki
The purpose of this project is to build some insightful and practical guidance around doing performance testing and using Visual Studio 2005. It's a collaborative effort between industry experts, Microsoft ACE, patterns & practices, Premier, and VSTS team members.

Videos

patterns & practices Video-Based Guidance for Visual Studio Team System
Short-burst, "what is" and "how to" videos that accompany the guidance.

.NET Framework and related technologies

	.NET Data Access Architecture Guide This document provides guidelines for implementing an ADO.NET-based data access layer in a multi-tier .NET-based application. It focuses on a range of common data access tasks and scenarios, and presents guidance to help you choose the most appropriate approaches and techniques.
	Application Architecture for .NET: Designing Applications and Services This guide provides architecture-level and design-level guidance for application architects and developers that need to build distributed solutions with the Microsoft® .NET Framework. This guide assumes you are familiar with .NET component development and the basic principles of a layered distributed application design. This guide is most critical to those that architect and design applications or services; recommend appropriate technologies and products for applications or services; make design decisions to meet functional and nonfunctional requirements; or choose appropriate communications mechanisms for applications or services.
	Application Interoperability: Microsoft .NET and J2EE Application Interoperability: Microsoft .NET and J2EE shows how to enable interoperability between enterprise class applications based on Java 2 Enterprise Edition (J2EE) and Microsoft .NET using service interfaces, use case interoperability adapters, and use case adapter factories. It covers how to add .NET Framework applications at the Presentation or the Business tier, together with implementing interoperability at the Data tier using message queuing and shared databases.
	Authentication in ASP.NET: .NET Security Guidance This document offers guidance to the application architect who is responsible for designing a security model for a Web-based application running on the .NET platform. The guide explains the relationship between IIS and ASP.NET from a security standpoint and describes the set of available authentication methods. It also contains procedures that can help you choose the most appropriate authentication method based on your particular application scenario.
	Building Secure ASP.NET Applications: Authentication, Authorization, and Secure Communication This guide presents a practical, scenario-driven approach to designing and building secure ASP.NET applications for Windows 2000 and .NET Framework version 1.0. It focuses on the key elements of authentication, authorization, and secure communication within and across the tiers of distributed .NET Web applications.
	Caching Architecture Guide for .NET Framework Applications This document provides caching guidance for developers and architects using the Microsoft .NET Framework. It introduces the concepts involved in caching, discusses the technologies that can be used to provide caching facilities, and describes the mechanisms you should implement to cache data in a distributed application. It contains recommendations and best practices for all aspects of caching in .NET-based applications.
	Data Patterns Data Patterns extends previous patterns work by applying it to data problems and showing how to solve them by using SQL Server. These patterns are about the problems faced by those who build the data services in an enterprise class business solution. The guide introduces patterns and why they are important to database designers and administrators, as well as architects and developers. It then presents a catalog of 12 architecture, design, and implementation patterns that are organized to help you locate the right combination of patterns to solve your problem.
	Deploying .NET Framework-based Applications This guide will give you the information necessary to plan and implement the effective deployment of your Framework-based applications. If your organization is developing .NET Framework-based applications, you face the challenge of deploying those applications efficiently and reliably throughout your environment. If you are experienced in the area of deployment, some of the challenges will be familiar. However, there are a number of new technologies in .NET Framework-based applications, and therefore several considerations that are unique to deploying them.
	Describing the Enterprise Architectural Space This document presents an organizing table that describes the enterprise architectural space, shows relationships among artifacts in the space, and demonstrates how different roles in your enterprise view enterprise architecture. This document also demonstrates how pattern authors can use this table to organize existing patterns and to identify areas where patterns are not currently documented.
	Design and Implementation Guidelines for Web Clients Design and Implementation Guidelines for Web Clients provides advice on how best to implement logic in the presentation layer of a distributed application. This guide is designed to accompany the User Interface Process Application Block, which provides a template implementation for user interface process components.
	Designing Application-Managed Authorization This guide provides guidelines for designing and coding application-managed authorization for single or multi-tier applications that are based on Microsoft® .NET. It focuses on common authorization tasks and scenarios, and it provides information that helps you choose the best approaches and techniques. This guide is intended for architects and developers.
	Designing Data Tier Components and Passing Data Through Tiers This guide covers data access and representation of business data in a distributed application and provides guidance to help you choose the most appropriate way to expose, persist, and pass data through the application tiers.
	Enterprise Solution Patterns Using Microsoft .NET Enterprise Solution Patterns Using Microsoft .NET embraces existing work in the patterns community, contributes new patterns, and shows how to implement these patterns in .NET. The guide explains how a pattern documents simple, proven mechanisms, and shows how collections of patterns provide a common language for developers and architects. The guide then presents a catalog of 32 architecture, design, and implementation patterns that are organized to help you locate the right combination of patterns to solve your problem.
	Exception Management Architecture Guide This document discusses design and implementation guidelines for exception management systems that use .NET technologies. It focuses on the process of handling exceptions within .NET-connected applications in a highly maintainable and supportable manner.
	Guidelines for Application Integration This guide examines in detail what application integration means and describes the capabilities needed to enable application integration. It discusses the major challenges involved and shows how you can adapt your application integration environment to meet those challenges. It also examines the Microsoft® software products and services you can use to help you design your application integration environment.
	Improving .NET Application Performance and Scalability This guide provides end-to-end guidance for managing performance and scalability throughout your application life cycle to reduce risk and lower total cost of ownership. It provides a framework that organizes performance into a handful of prioritized categories where your choices affect performance and scalability success. Information is segmented by role to make it more relevant and actionable. This guide suggests processes and steps for modeling performance, as well as measuring, testing, and tuning your applications. Expert guidance is also provided for improving the performance of managed code, ASP.NET, Enterprise Services, Web services, remoting, ADO.NET, XML, and SQL Server.
	Improving Web Application Security: Threats and Countermeasures This guide gives you a solid foundation for designing, building, and configuring secure ASP.NET Web applications. Whether you have existing applications or are building new ones, you can apply the guidance to help you make sure that your Web applications are hack-resilient.
	Integration Patterns Integration Patterns explains how patterns were used to design and build a baseline integration architecture within a representative customer scenario. The guide presents a catalog of 18 integration patterns including implementations that use the Microsoft platform.
	Smart Client Architecture and Design Guide The Smart Client Architecture and Design Guide gives advice on how to overcome architectural challenges and design issues when building smart client solutions. It also provides guidance on how to combine the benefits of traditional rich client applications with the manageability of thin client applications.
	Testing .NET Application Blocks - Version 1.0 Testing .NET Application Blocks covers many testing areas that were used during testing and verification of the various application blocks provided by Microsoft's patterns & practices group, such as functional, globalization, performance, integration, and security. The guide uses code examples, sample test cases, and checklists to demonstrate how to plan and implement each type of test.
	Testing Software Patterns Testing has a different agenda: to substantiate designs and implementations based on certain criteria and according to a methodology. Hence, following Microsoft Solution Framework (MSF) processes, the test team has developed a formal testing methodology and testing criteria, which are distilled from best practices found in the larger patterns community. This document describes the testing methodology that the test team developed and applied to the new field of testing software patterns.
	Upgrading Visual Basic 6.0 Applications to Visual Basic .NET and Visual Basic 2005 This guide provides proven and successful practices for organizations who are considering upgrading their Visual Basic 6.0-based applications and components to Visual Basic .NET and Visual Basic 2005. It also includes additional tools to help estimate the effort and cost of the upgrade.
	Guidance Automation Toolkit The Guidance Automation Toolkit is an extension to Visual Studio 2005 that allows architects to author rich, integrated user experiences for reusable assets including frameworks, components and patterns. (December 2005 release for Visual Studio 2005)
	Web Service Security Guidance Provides architectural, design, and implementation guidance for applying security to Web services by using Web Services Enhancements (WSE) 3.0 and the .NET Framework 2.0. Includes scenarios, patterns, decision matrices, and QuickStarts to help you make the most appropriate decisions based on your solution’s requirements.

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