Wednesday, February 01, 2006

Designing Distributed System using VS.Net 2005 Team System

The Distributed System Designers are tools that support the graphical design and validation of distributed systems. This toolset includes tools for application architects, designers, developers and operations architects. The Distributed System Designers are an early deliverable from the Dynamic Systems Initiative (DSI), aimed at improving the development, deployment and management of enterprise-class distributed systems.

The Distributed System Designers provide an integrated design experience with the goal of enabling the visual design and validation of distributed systems. Designers use the System Definition Model (SDM) as the underlying meta-model that describes connectivity, configuration and relationships not only for the application services, but also for the run-time environments. SDM is based on a multi-layered model that includes applications, application hosting environments, network topology, operating systems, and physical devices. This model allows the Distributed System Designers to not only describe designs at each layer, but also to express constraints and policies at each layer that can cut across all layers of a distributed system.

The Distributed System Designers support an integrated model of two domains—development and operations. This allows the designers to address customer problems in the following ways:
  • Provides a common language (based on SDM) for describing the design and configuration of a distributed system.
  • Allows developers to express what the application requires of the run-time environment.
  • Allows operations to express application runtime, security, and connectivity requirements that are the policies of the target deployment environment.
  • Uses abstractions that allow developers and operations to communicate on common ground.
  • Integrates with the existing Visual Studio project system and .NET technologies.
  • Provides full synchronization between visual design elements and code.
  • Includes an extensibility framework to allow new kinds of application and hosting systems to be modeled.

The following section elaborates on the capabilities of the individual designers and editors in the Distributed System Designers toolset.

The Distributed System Designers include the following designers:

  • Application Connection Designer
  • Logical Datacenter Designer
  • System Designer
  • Deployment Designer

We will discuss these designers in the other threads.

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