About the BDG

Welcome to the BackOffice® Developer's Guide (BDG). The BDG represents a new approach to product documentation. We illustrate end-to-end application development using Microsoft® BackOffice Server. In this guide, you will follow a development team through the stages of planning, designing, coding, and deploying applications for the enterprise computing environment. The BDG is part of Microsoft's effort to unify its development models under the framework of Microsoft Windows® Distributed interNet Applications Architecture (Windows DNA). In short, the BackOffice Developer's Guide teaches you how to design, build, and deploy Windows DNA applications.

The Windows DNA design accommodates the way in which technologies evolve and become superceded. With Windows DNA, you build applications from pieces and distribute them on a network in layers called tiers. Furthermore, every Windows DNA application is built using Microsoft's Component Object Model (COM) technology.

The applications presented here use currently shipping technologies and products, focusing on those that customers use widely and that figure prominently in the Microsoft BackOffice suite. In this guide, you will find that some applications strongly feature some BackOffice products and leave others out. In time, the BDG will present applications that highlight BackOffice products that were not emphasized previously.

The BDG delivers its message through working applications built for fictional corporations, including the Fitch & Mather Corporation. We describe these applications through scenarios that illustrate significant technologies. It is our intention to produce applications that not only serve as teaching samples, but also could be deployed in a real organization.

Yet the BDG remains a teaching tool. Even in conceptual sections we carefully examine working code. We have written, for example, a new version of the familiar "Hello World" application to demonstrate the fundamental principles of Windows DNA applications. When you move into the analysis of each scenario, you find candid discussions of the technology choices available for implementing a feature; some choices are better than others, and we explain why. You also find code examined in minute detail. Each scenario concludes with an in-depth discussion of the sometimes painful lessons the development team learned as they wrote the application.