patterns & practices Solution Engineering

This is one of my favorite figures that shows how we do solution engineering in patterns & practices at Microsoft : Architectural Scenarios It all starts with a scenario.  It has to be a meaningful problem.  You can’t evaluate an architecture in a vacuum.  In order for us to build useful baseline architectures, we need to pick the right scenarios that flex the right engineering decisions. Patterns Patterns are simply problem and solution pairs.  In our case, we tend to focus on application, architecture or solution level patterns. Baseline Architectures Baseline architectures are skeletal applications.  They’re just enough code to show you how to solve the key engineering decisions.  The ideal baseline architecture is durable, but evolvable. Application Block Library These are reusable components.  You can think of these as the cross-cutting concerns and the key application infrastructure hot spots. Tool Extensions Once we have a repe...