In this chapter, we've introduced many new concepts and terms. Don't worry if it all seems a little foreign and abstract at the moment, the purpose of this book is to show how these ideas translate into tangible applications.
We began the chapter by looking at the concept of application development, as being distinct from programming, and then moved on to look at client/server and 3-tier applications as examples of distributed applications. At this point, the idea of a software development process and software life cycle management was introduced.
We then moved away from the theoretical and started to look at the products we need to implement a distributed application using the Windows DNA platform. Then, to bring us right back down to earth, we introduced the WROBA case study, which we'll be using to illustrate 3-tier application development using Visual Basic, and summarized the software we'll be using to build our solution.
Before we move on, let's just recap on some of the major points of the chapter:
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Application development and software life cycle management encompass all the stages involved in planning and building an application, from inception to maintaining the released application.
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A software development process is a description of the activities required to transform business requirements into a software product and, later, to translate changes in these requirements into a new release of the software product.
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The 3-tier Application Model consists of a logical 3-tier services-based approach to designing and developing software applications utilizing user, business logic and data tiers where:
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The user tier is responsible for the user interface and generates data requests to the business logic tier. This layer resides either on the user's computer (desktop Windows clients) or in IIS on a server (Internet-based clients).
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The business logic tier is where the application-specific processing and business rules are maintained.
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The data tier is focused only on getting data out of or putting data into the database.
Our next task is to understand a little more about the software development process prior to actually getting our hands dirty and starting on some programming.
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