Visual Studio Solutions Center

Welcome to the Visual Studio Solutions Center - your source for sample end-to-end solutions built with Visual Studio.

The solutions provided here are intended to provide:

• How to properly architect complex applications.
• How to approach application development with documented design decisions and tradeoffs that were made.
• How to use the integrated tools in Visual Studio.

Fitch and Mather Stock Application

FMStocks is a three-tier Web application that illustrates best coding practices to achieve a high level of performance and scalability. It is published on this site as a reference Windows DNA application that has been benchmarked by National Software Testing Laboratories (NSTL) running under heavy concurrent browser loads of over 7,000 web clients. It can be used as a design pattern for building highly scalable applications using ASP and Visual Basic 6.0 with IIS and MTS. The application is based on a simplified financial management scenario. It includes Web-based searching, portfolio management, and transactions implemented via database-generated Web pages.

It illustrates:

• How to build a scalable, stateless MTS Web application
• How to build an application that can be load balanced using Windows Load Balancing Services
• N-tier Web programming using Visual Basic and Visual InterDev together
• ADO 2.1 best coding practices
• Proper use of SQL Server 7.0 stored procedures to achieve high performance
• How to tune the various htmects of the application by testing under load
• Transaction-enabled access to the database. Transactions wrap ASP pages and middle-tier VB components, and database access via stored procedures and triggers.

Fitch and Mather Expense Reporting System

The Fitch and Mather solution illustrates an online expense reporting application. The solution involves submitting expense data gathered from Microsoft Excel and distributing it to a web server for online viewing and authorization. The expense report submitter's supervisor must approve or decline the expenses that will update the web site and the underlying database.

Technologies Featured:

• Using XML to pass structured data back to the server. Uses a lightweight XML parser on server.
• Two types of login validation (NT Challenge-Response for IE4 browsers and clear-text).
• Transaction-enabled access to the database. Transactions wrap the ASP page, middle-tier VB components, and database access via stored procedures and triggers. Triggers can catch business logic problems and roll back the transaction with minimal changes to the middle-tier.

Fitch & Mather Corporate Media Library Application  

This first installment of the BackOffice Developer's Guide presents another three-tier application serving the fictional Fitch & Mather Corporation. The Corporate Media Library application uses the technologies of Microsoft BackOffice Server to deliver an interactive library catalog. Employees can search the catalog, check out books, and receive overdue notices. Furthermore, the librarians can administer the catalog, adding and deleting titles.

Technologies Featured:

• Distributed Logic with COM. The various parts of the application communicate with each other using either Component Object Model (COM) objects that ship with Microsoft systems and applications, or custom COM objects that perform the specialized work needed by the application.
• Integration with Microsoft Transaction Server. The custom COM objects that handle the business logic of the applicaiton ù the requests for searches, for checkout, and notification of overdue items ù are managed by MTS. MTS automatically handles the details of object creation and destruction, and manages system resources such as database connections.
• Database Communications with ADO and RDS. The movement of data back and forth from the SQL Server database and the Internet Explorer user interface is handled through objects created using ActiveX Data Objects (ADO) and the Remote Data Service (RDS) control.

Duwamish Books

The Duwamish Books sample application is a sales and inventory system. The solution is presented in phases to illustrate the real world problem of migration from a simple architecture to a Web-based n-tier architecture.

The sample includes a Point of Sale, Order Entry, Catalog and Shipping and Receiving modules. The Point of Sale module is used by the cashier to enter a sale, print out receipts, and update the inventory. The Order Entry module is used to track the various orders for new books and supplies. This module ties into inventory also. The Catalog module is used to search titles, authors, keywords, ISBN, and so on, and is used by the other applications for checking stock on hand. The Shipping and Receiving modules handles the shipping of orders to customers and the receiving of orders from suppliers (which originate from the order entry program). This module must do all the inventory management necessary for stock keeping.

Technologies featured:

• Modeling business transactions and transaction management
• Connected and disconnected recordsets
• Scaling data access components

Island Hopper News

The Island Hopper News sample application showcases an online newspaper. The solution focuses on the business process of evolving an existing manual process to a client/server application. Ultimately the solution is evolved into a three-tier, component-based, distributed architecture with both Web and Windows-based clients.

Technologies Featured:

• Island Hopper News demonstrates how to use Microsoft Transaction Server to manage distributed components.
• Illustrates how to use the Microsoft ActiveX Data Objects (ADO) disconnected recordsets feature to optimize application performance when using a remote database.
• This solution shipped in Visual Studio 6 as the overall sample for building with all of the tools included in Visual Studio.

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