Catalog by Guidance Type

Application Blocks are reusable blocks of source-code that encapsulate proven solutions to common development challenges.
Guides provide conceptual architecture & design guidelines along with prescriptive "how to" information.
Reference Implementations are executable sample applications that demonstrate patterns & practices guidance in action.
Software Factories help architects and developers predictably and efficiently create high-quality instances of specific types of applications.

Applications Blocks

Composite Application Guidance for WPF and Silverlight (October 2009)
The Composite Application Guidance for WPF and Silverlight is designed to help you more easily build enterprise-level Windows Presentation Foundation (WPF) and Silverlight client applications. This guidance will help you design and build flexible composite client applications.
Friday, Oct 30, 2009

Unity Application Block v1.2 for Silverlight (December 2008)
The Unity Application Block (Unity) is a lightweight, extensible dependency injection container. It facilitates building loosely coupled applications and provides developers with simplified object creation, abstraction of requirements, increased flexibility, and service location capability. This release of Unity is a port of Unity Application Block 1.2 to Microsoft Silverlight 2.0. Silverlight has some differences from the desktop common language runtime (CLR), so some capabilities and packaging of the Unity container have been adjusted in this release.
Saturday, Dec 13, 2008

Enterprise Library v4.1 (October 2008)
The patterns & practices Enterprise Library is a collection of reusable and extensible application blocks designed to assist developers with common enterprise development challenges. Enterprise Library contains application blocks for Caching, Cryptography, Data Access, Exception Handling, Logging, Dependency Injection, Security and Validation.
Monday, Oct 27, 2008

Unity Application Block v1.2 (October 2008)
The Unity Application Block (Unity) is a lightweight, extensible dependency injection container. It facilitates building loosely coupled applications and provides developers with simplified object creation, abstraction of requirements, increased flexibility, and service location capability.
Monday, Oct 27, 2008

Validation Application Block (May 2007)
The Validation Application Block is a component of Enterprise Library which provides a common approach to defining validation rules for your business objects that allows them to be reused across different layers of your application.
Thursday, May 31, 2007

Security Application Block (May 2007)
The Security Application Block is a component of Enterprise Library that builds on the capabilities of the Microsoft .NET Framework to help you perform authentication, authorization, check role membership and access profile information.
Thursday, May 31, 2007

Policy Injection Application Block (May 2007)
The Policy Injection Application Block is a component of Enterprise Library which allows developers to specify the crosscutting behavior of objects in terms of a set of policies. Crosscutting concerns are the necessary tasks, features, or processes that are common across different objects. Examples are logging, authorization, validation, and instrumentation.
Thursday, May 31, 2007

Logging Application Block (May 2007)
The Logging Application Block is a component of Enterprise Library that allows developers to instrument their applications with logging and tracing calls. Log and trace messages can be filtered, formatted and routed to a choice of trace listeners, including the event log, text files, database or WMI.
Thursday, May 31, 2007

Exception Handling Application Block (May 2007)
The Exception Handling Application Block is a component of Enterprise Library that makes it easier to implement consistent exception handling policies at logical tiers in an application. Exception policies can be configured to perform tasks such as logging exceptions, wrapping or replacing exception types.
Thursday, May 31, 2007

Data Access Application Block (May 2007)
The Data Access Application Block is a component of Enterprise Library which reduces the amount of custom code that you need to create, test, and maintain when building data access layers in .NET applications.
Thursday, May 31, 2007

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Guides

Microsoft ESB Guidance for BizTalk Server 2006 R2 (November 2007)
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.
Thursday, Nov 8, 2007

Performance Testing Guidance for Web Applications (September 2007)
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.
Monday, Aug 27, 2007

Team Development with Visual Studio Team Foundation Server (September 2007)
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.
Friday, Jul 6, 2007

Building Secure ASP.NET Applications: Authentication, Authorization, and Secure Communication (Reviewed January 2006)
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.
Sunday, Jan 15, 2006

Web Service Security Guidance (December 2005)
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.
Thursday, Dec 15, 2005

Security Guidance for .NET Framework 2.0 (August 2005)
This page provides an index to the patterns & practices Security Guidance for .NET Framework 2.0 project. You can use the guidance to improve both the security of your applications and your approach to building secure applications.
Monday, Aug 15, 2005

Security Guidance for Applications Index (August 2005)
This page provides an index of patterns & practices Security Guidance for applications. The resources include guides and books available on MSDN together with modular content of various types including scenarios and solutions, guidelines, explained, checklists, and How Tos.
Monday, Aug 15, 2005

Security Engineering Index (August 2005)
This page provides an index to available and emerging guidance for patterns & practices Security Engineering. To build secure applications, security engineering activities must be an integral part of your software development practices.
Monday, Aug 15, 2005

Threat Modeling Web Applications (May 2005)
This guidance presents the patterns & practices approach to creating threat models for Web applications. Threat modeling is an engineering technique you can use to help you identify threats, attacks, vulnerabilities, and countermeasures that could affect your application.
Monday, May 16, 2005

Testing .NET Application Blocks - Version 1.0 (January 2005)
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.
Thursday, Jan 13, 2005

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Reference Implementations

The Software Factories listed in this section contain a Reference Implementation.

Microsoft Application Architecture Guide: 2nd Edition (October 2009)
The guide is intended to help developers and solution architects design and build effective, high quality applications using the Microsoft platform and the .NET Framework more quickly and with less risk; it provides guidance for using architecture principles, design principles, and patterns that are tried and trusted. The guidance is presented in sections that correspond to major architecture and design focus points. It is designed to be used as a reference resource or to be read from beginning to end. This guide is also available as a book from Microsoft Press (ISBN 9780735627109)
Tuesday, Oct 13, 2009

Developing SharePoint Applications (August 2009)
This guidance helps solution architects and software developers build applications using SharePoint. The guide covers areas such as fundamental design and development decisions, enterprise qualities, flexible content oriented approaches, and LOB integration. It provides reusable components to help with logging, repositories, configuration, service location, and event driven site creation. Two reference implementations demonstrate a partner extranet (using MOSS) and a training management application (using WSS).
Wednesday, Aug 19, 2009

Improving Web Services Security: Scenarios and Implementation Guidance for WCF (February 2009)
Using end-to-end application scenarios, this guide shows you how to design and implement authentication and authorization in WCF. You will learn how to improve the security of your WCF services through prescriptive guidance including guidelines, a Q&A, practices at a glance, and step-by-step how to articles.
Sunday, Feb 1, 2009

Smart Client Software Factory (April 2008)
The Smart Client Software Factory provides an integrated set of guidance that assists architects and developers in creating composite smart client applications. The software factory extends Visual Studio 2005 (May 2007 release) and Visual Studio 2008 (April 2008 release) with additional guidance that helps to automate designing and developing occasionally-connected composite smart client applications. The resulting application architecture is both extensible and customizable.
Friday, Apr 25, 2008

Web Service Software Factory: Modeling Edition (February 2008)
The Web Service Software Factory: Modeling Edition (also known as the Service Factory) is an integrated collection of resources designed to help you quickly and consistently build Web services that adhere to well-known architecture and design patterns. These resources consist of patterns and architecture topics in the form of written guidance and models with code generation in the form of tools integrated with Visual Studio 2005 and Visual Studio 2008.
Tuesday, Mar 25, 2008

Web Client Software Factory (February 2008)
The patterns & practices Web Client Software Factory is a comprehensive set of guidelines, assets, and automation that developers use to create architecturally sound, modular, Web applications, with the latest technologies from Microsoft, such as ASP.NET 2.0 and Windows Workflow Foundation.
Thursday, Mar 13, 2008

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Software Factories

Mobile Client Software Factory (July 2006)
The Mobile Client Software Factory provides an integrated set of guidance assets to help architects and developers create line-of-business Windows Mobile applications that interact with back-end systems over a variety of networks.
Saturday, Jul 15, 2006

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