Overview of Microsoft Application Development Concepts

Microsoft's latest framework for discussing application development is known as the Enterprise Application Model. The EAM is really an umbrella that covers the following six distinct ways, or "models," of looking at any development project:

• The Development Model has to do with the software development process, including project management and testing.

• The Business Model concerns itself with business goal definition, resource decisions about the project, and business rules and policies affecting the project.

• The User Model takes up issues of user interface, training, documentation, support, and configuration.

• The Logical Model deals with the logical structure and modeling of business objects and service interface definitions within the project.

• The Technology Model attends to reusability of software components, system and database platforms, and system resource-management decisions.

• The Physical Model the final product, encompasses the architecture of developed components, their distribution, and their interconnections.

Although all these models are important (each in its own way) to the overall makeup of the Enterprise Application Model, the most important of these models, and the one you will be mostly concerned with as a VB programmer, is the Development Model.

The Development Model is important because Microsoft sees it as the pivotal link that holds together the rest of the EAM. It provides this glue in two ways:

• The Development Model is responsible for mediating between the Business Model, on the one hand, and the User, Logical, and Technology Models on the other.

• The Development Model is also responsible for mediating between the User, Logical, and Technology Models, on the one hand, and the Physical Model on the other.

Microsoft's latest Visual Studio documentation also speaks of a scalable, team-centered approach to solution development. This team model identifies six major roles:

• Product management
• Program management
• Development
• Test and quality assurance (QA)
• User education
• Logistics planning

The model is scalable because, according to the size and needs of the project, all six roles can be distributed to six different teams, or among fewer teams (with some teams performing multiple roles), or among more than six teams (some roles will be performed by several teams). In the most extreme case, one individual might perform the tasks of all six teams.