We feel that many designers and architects lack an understanding of how to use Microsoft
technology to build and implement large enterprise solutions. Far too often we have found
architects shivering at the thought of building mission-critical systems based on this technology—
not because they have tried and failed in their attempts, but because they simply do not
have a good awareness of what tools are available. We want to change this.
The idea for this book came up in 2002. We first thought about writing this as an internal
document at Cap Gemini Ernst & Young. When doing research on the market, we discovered
that very few books focused on the IT architect and system designer. Most books were directed
toward the developer, and we wanted a book for a broader audience. Because we think many
IT architects lack a thorough understanding of what they can actually achieve on aMicrosoft
platform, we decided that we should extend the intended audience of our document outside
Cap Gemini Ernst & Young and try publishing it as a book. Apress has always published great
books, so we turned to them first. Gary Cornell became interested, and this book is the result.

This book should be especially valuable for those architects, designers, and developers who
are new to enterprise development in Microsoft environments; this includes both those used
to designing and building smaller-sized applications for Microsoft Windows and those used to
designing and building enterprise-class applications in other environments such as J2EE. It
should also be a fine book for university classes, because it gives students such a good overview
of the technologies many of them will live with once they’re out of the university. Joachim and
Rickard have all the reason in the world to be proud of what they have achieved with this book.

The target audience is primarily designers and IT architects, but we try to cover topics we feel
are valuable for developers to have knowledge about as well. First, let us define these three
categories. Different companies may have different definitions for these terms, so to avoid
confusion we will specify what we mean here.