• Architecture Frame. The guide uses a frame to organize the key architecture and design
decision points into categories, where your choices have a major impact on the success of
your application.
• Principles and practices. These serve as the foundation for the guide, and provide a stable
basis for recommendations. They also reflect successful approaches used in the field.
• Modular. Each chapter within the guide is designed to be read independently. You do not
need to read the guide from beginning to end to get the benefits. Feel free to use just the
parts you need.
• Holistic. If you do read the guide from beginning to end, it is organized to fit together. The
guide, in its entirety, is better than the sum of its parts.
• Subject matter expertise. The guide exposes insight from various experts throughout
Microsoft, and from customers in the field.
• Validation. The guidance is validated internally through testing. In addition, product, field,
and support teams have performed extensive reviews. Externally, the guidance is validated
through community participation and extensive customer feedback cycles.
• What to do, why, how. Each section in the guide presents a set of recommendations. At the
start of each section, the guidelines are summarized using bold, bulleted lists. This gives you
a snapshot view of the recommendations. Then each recommendation is expanded to help
you understand what to do, why, and how.
• Checklists. Use the checklists to review your design as input to drive architecture and design
reviews for your application.
Audience
This guide is useful to anyone who cares about application design and architecture. The primary
audience for this guide is solution architects and development leads, but any technologist who
wants to understand good application design on the .NET platform will benefit from reading it.
Ways to Use the Guide
You can use this comprehensive guidance in several ways, both as you learn more about the
architectural process and as a way to instill knowledge in the members of your team. The
following are some ideas:
• Use it as a reference. Use the guide as a reference and learn the architecture and design
practices for service Applications on the .NET Framework.
• Use it as a mentor. Use the guide as your mentor for learning how to design an application
that meets your business goals and quality attributes objectives. The guide encapsulates the
lessons learned and experience from many subject-matter experts.
• Use it when you design applications. Design applications using the principles and practices
in the guide, and benefit from the lessons learned.
• Create training. Create training from the concepts and techniques used throughout the
guide, as well as from the technical insight into the .NET Framework technologies.
Service Architecture Pocket Guide
Microsoft patterns & practices
