Microsoft® .NET: Architecting Applications for the Enterprise

Introduction

Good judgment comes from experience, and experience comes from bad judgment.

— Fred Brooks

Every time we are engaged on a software project, we create a solution. We call the process architecting, and the resulting concrete artifact is the architecture. Architecture can be implicit or explicit.

An implicit architecture is the design of the solution we create mentally and persist on a bunch of Microsoft Office Word documents, when not on handwritten notes. An implicit architecture is the fruit of hands-on experience, the reuse of tricks learned while working on similar projects, and an inherent ability to form abstract concepts and factor them into the project at hand. If you’re an expert artisan, you don’t need complex drawings ...