With a solid infrastructure in place, you have at least a fighting chance of delivering a successful project. Upon that foundation you'll need a framework to guide your actual project work: what members make up your project team and what are their respective roles, how the different "stages" of the project are defined and how can you complete them, and how your application is both logically and physically described/architected. In this section we'll describe such a framework, using as a base the application development components of the Microsoft Solutions Framework. But before you get bleary-eyed at the prospect of yet another dry theoretical discussion, remember our focus is to show how to do large-scale Visual Basic project work — so we'll be adapting this approach to describe how it's worked for our firm in the very specific world of developing large Visual Basic client-server applications.
To begin, let's define some terms.
Microsoft defines the Microsoft Solutions Framework (MSF) as "a suite of concepts and reference models that help organizations build and deploy enterprise systems." The application development components of MSF are well-suited for today's rapidly evolving, GUI-based client server world. Specifically, they consist of:
We will describe these in turn.