Course Description

Learning Goals

This 5-day course will cover the whole development process needed to create successful distributed and service oriented .NET enterprise applications using .NET 3.5/4.0 and Visual Studio 2008/2010. Students will be guided through the end to end creation of a complete enterprise application. You will study in-depth and practice the latest .NET technologies that are required to develop an enterprise application. This course provides participants with technical guidelines on design and implementation in .NET making participants skillful and ready for action.

Target Audience

This course is indented for professional C# or VB.NET programmers experienced with Visual Studio 2005 or 2008 and .NET 3.x who are interested to learn how to implement the .NET 3.5/4.0 technologies in enterprise applications.

Course Outline

Implementing the Service Oriented Architecture

This module presents an overall view of the development process of a .NET enterprise application.

• The service oriented architecture, the concept of services and messages, the logical and physical architectures for multi-tier applications, guidelines, and design patterns.
• The enterprise application programming paradigms available in .NET
• Overview of the building blocks of an enterprise application implemented in .NET
• Overview of the technologies and design patterns available in .NET

The Enterprise application skeleton

Starting from a skeleton for a multitier enterprise application, this module will teach you how to divide an enterprise application into logical layers, how to implement this in physical layers and what best practices are available out of the box. Students will learn how to create their classes in .NET assemblies, and will apply advanced object-oriented techniques for encapsulating and exposing the data using interfaces; when and how to create private either shared assemblies.

• Working with several assemblies in the same solution
• Linking assemblies using References, Versioning, the Global Assembly Cache
• The principle of the 3 layer architecture: Presentation, Business and Data Access Layer
• Physical implementation of a layered solution in .NET: the data layer, business layer, presentation layer and framework layer

Implementing the Data Access Layer

In this module you will study how to build a data access layer. This layer is responsible for persisting data stored in objects and datasets to databases. Because we will be loading data from databases, both ADO.NET, LINQ to SQL and Entity Framework will be demonstrated as another way of accessing data from databases. We will look at the pros and cons of using datasets and/or data objects, and look at what kind of problems might occur when several users access the same databases and relating locking strategies. Covered are also the .NET patterns for decoupling the data access layers, in order to be able to replace one data layer with another data layer, for example one that uses Oracle.

• Building the data layer using ADO.NET
• Building the data layer using LINQ
• Using Entity Framework to build the data layer
• DataSets vs. Entities (objects)
• Creating serializable data objects
• Solving concurrent update problems
• Decoupling the Data Layer from the Business Layer using the Provider Pattern

Building reusable Business Components

This module discusses how to build a business layer and confronts you with the problem of how to check business rules in the business layer and how to reuse these business rules in the presentation layer to minimize round-trips to the server. You will learn how to add role based security in an enterprise application, how to work with transactions in order to update data correctly and to keep datastores consistent.

• Creating business rules in the Business Layer
• Building reusable components to check business rules
• Building configuration code for business rules
• Returning errors from the Business Layer
• Using role based security
• Adding component transactions with System.Transactions
• Understanding Timeout and Isolation Levels

Building the Service Layer

In this module students will learn how to expose their business components as services through Windows Communication Foundation (WCF). WCF allows services to be exposed on the intranet, extranet and the public internet using protocols such as TCP, HTTP and Message Queuing. You will study security, reliability, transactions... and not to forget interoperability with the previous .NET 2.0 web service technologies.

• The principles of WCF in an enterprise application
• Implementing WCF services: Address, Binding and Contract
• Exposing and consuming services through service contracts
• Securing WCF services: transport vs. message security, authentication and authorization...
• Impersonation systems and trusted subsystems
• Implementing reliability, transactions
• Building highly scalable and reliable systems with message queues: using System.Messaging and WCF Queuing

Implementing the Presentation Layer

The Presentation layer is responsible for interaction with the user, for exposing enterprise data and making it available for user consummation. .NET offers developers a variety of technologies: the traditional Windows Forms, ASP.NET web forms, ASP.NET MVC, Silverlight and Windows Presentation Foundation. This module discusses important concepts such as data binding and validation and caching for disconnected scenarios.

• Available patterns for building the presentation layer
• Windows Forms and smart clients
• ASP.NET web forms
• ASP.NET MVC
• Windows Presentation Foundation
• Silverlight
• Displaying data with data binding
• Doing data validation and displaying validation errors

Implementing workflows in an enterprise application

Workflow Foundation (WF) is the foundation for workflow enabled enterprise applications. You will learn how to integrate workflows in a multitier application and learn how to implement workflows allowing services and information workers to collaborate in an enterprise environment. Both WF 3.5 and WF 4.0 will be illustrated.

• Architecture of Windows Workflow Foundation (WF): workflow as collection of activities, types of workflows
• Orchestrating services with workflows in enterprise applications
• Adding Human interaction to your application using workflows
• Running workflows and hosting workflows in a multitier application

Building, deploying and configuring an enterprise application

Once an application has been developed it needs to be built, deployed and configured.

• Building, deploying and configuring local assemblies
• Building, deploying and configuring shared assemblies in the Global Assembly Cache
• Best practices for building enterprise applications: build instructions, batch build, Team Foundation Build Server...
• Out of the box deployment technologies: Setup projects, Publishing techniques, Click-Once, MSI...
• Configuration of data base connections, services, security, logging...
• Custom configuration techniques
• Versioning and maintaining .NET enterprise applications