FAQ: Visual Studio Team Edition for Software Architects

	What is SDM? The System Definition Model (SDM), a part of the DSI, is a live Extensible Markup Language (XML) blueprint that spans the IT life cycle and unifies IT operational policies with the operational requirements of applications. It is relevant at both design time and at run time. At design time, it will be exposed through Visual Studio to enable IT operators to capture their policies in software and developers to describe application operational requirements. At deployment time, the SDM description of the application will enable the operating system to automatically deploy the complete application and dynamically allocate a set of distributed server, storage, and networking resources that the application requires. Throughout ongoing operations, the SDM also enables the operating system to easily grow and shrink the necessary resources that are associated with a particular application, based on changing business needs. The distributed system designers are an early demonstration of Visual Studio's support for the SDM.
	What is the Dynamic Systems Initiative? Dynamic Systems Initiative (DSI) is a broad Microsoft and industry initiative uniting hardware, software, and service vendors around a new software architecture based on the System Definition Model (SDM). This new architecture is becoming the focal point for how we are working to dramatically simplify and automate how our customers will develop, deploy, and operate applications and IT infrastructure. Over time, support for the SDM will be delivered in Visual Studio, across the Windows Server System family, and in our management tools—known as System Center. For a general overview of DSI, have a look at the DSI Web site or view the on-demand Webcasts which walk you step-by-step through the vision for DSI and our management products roadmap.
	What languages are supported by the Distributed System Designers? The Distributed System Designers and the Class Designer support C#, VB, and J#.
	What will the distributed system designers do for my distributed solution in terms of security? The Distributed System Designers will support constraining and validating your design against IIS Security, SQL Security, and ASP.NET Security settings and constraints. In addition, for each host and service component relationship, we have enabled pre-built constraints that you can use. For example, you can ensure that an application component requiring Windows authentication will only deploy to an IIS server that supports Windows authentication. In addition, we support the authoring of simple constraints as well as specifying custom settings for the security requirements of your own organization. Your simple and custom constraints can be validated by the Distributed System Designers.
	Are the distributed system designers considered an enterprise-level toolset or are they meant for medium-sized or small-sized organizations? The distributed system designers are a set of design tools to help customers solve problems that occur at all levels and for all organizations, including enterprises building mission-critical software and services.
	Can I extend the distributed system designers with my own functionality? We have a simple end user extensibility model for the first release of the Distributed System Designers. This allows you to take any of the basic services or clients (such as Web services, Web applications, Windows applications, external services, or external databases) on the application diagram; or any host (such as IIS, Windows, or SQL) on the logical datacenter diagram, and extend it using the SDM SDK. In addition Microsoft recently released a set of tools for creating domain-specific designers in Visual Studio 2005. This tool allows you to build your own custom designers on top of the infrastructure that powers the Visual Studio Team System Distributed System Designers and the Class Designer. Please see DSL Tools for more information.
	Where can I find more information on additional modeling capabilities in Visual Studio Team System? In addition to this FAQ, please see the Visual Studio Team System Modeling Strategy white paper.
	What are the Distributed System Designers? The Distributed System Designers are a set of design tools in Visual Studio 2005 Team Edition for Software Architects that help reduce the complexity of developing and deploying service-oriented applications. The set of designers include: Application Designer that allows developers and architects to define applications that will be configured into systems for deployment. Logical Datacenter Designer that can be used to create diagrams or interconnected hosts that represent the logical structure of a datacenter for the purpose of communicating important information to the developer about the target deployment environment. System Designer that can be used to compose applications into systems. Deployment Designer that is used to bind applications within your system to logical servers (application hosts) modeled in a logical datacenter diagram. Application architects can visualize their service-oriented applications and developers can work with the generated code while keeping the code changes synchronized with the visual design. Infrastructure architects can create logical abstractions of their datacenter and validate it against the constraints of the application/datacenter designed by the application architect prior to actual deployment. Reports generated from this validation help to document the deployment mapping.

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