Professional Visual Studio® 2008

Chapter 54. VSTS: Architect Edition

The Architect Edition aids in designing applications and datacenters, as well as planning for the deployment of these applications. This is not another UML tool. It goes far beyond what simple diagrams could give us. Thanks to the tight integration with the platform and IDE, the artifacts used for the diagrams will translate nicely to other concepts already used. The diagrams go from simple documents to definitions that can actually be validated to see ahead from day one.

This chapter covers the different diagrams used to model Distributed Systems. To start, you look at the Application Designer and see how you can model the communication paths. Then you see how the Logical Datacenter Designer (LDD) allows you to define a view of your servers and the way you connect them through the different communication boundaries. Also, you see how an LDD can constrain servers to host only certain kinds of applications or allow for only certain communications. Finally, you see how the Deployment and System Designer will map applications and systems to servers and allow you to evaluate how the deployment meets the constraints and settings of both the applications and servers.

All designers include general tools to add comments and connections and to zoom in and out. You can add diagrams by right-clicking the solution and selecting Add New Distributed System Diagram from the Add menu. There you have three options: Application Diagram (AD), Logical Datacenter ...