Chapter 1, Enterprise Architecture Concepts, helps you understand the fundamental concepts of enterprise architecture and its related business need and benefits. As the best practice in the industry, enterprise architecture is expected to have the responsibility to perform the strategic steps in alignment with the business vision. An enterprise architecture has few strong fundamental blocks, namely, agility, durability, efficiency, and effectiveness. An enterprise architecture is the discipline of addressing business needs with people, process, and technology, with the definition of purpose, intent, and structure of enterprise applications.
Chapter 2, Principles and Patterns, provides an introduction to SOLID principles and design patterns, but also provides C# .NET Core-based implementations to some of the famous design patterns, including GoF patterns and Dependency Injection.
Chapter 3, Distributed Computing, explains that the reader will get an opportunity to understand the fundamentals of this computing and application in the enterprise world. It starts from the definition, followed by its core characteristics, such as concurrency, scalability, transparency, security, and more. In the modern world, distributed computing plays a vital role.
Chapter 4, Software Development Life Cycle, covers SDLC, which is a term used in systems engineering, information systems, and software engineering as a process. This tutorial elaborates on various methodologies, such as Waterfall, Spiral, Agile, and so on. At the end of this chapter, you will understand the fundamental concepts of Enterprise Architecture and its related business needs and benefits. It has started from the traditional Waterfall model and traversed through multi-iteration Spiral model, trendy Agile model with the specific Scaled Agile Framework (SAFe). On traversing through various timelines and related methodologies, it has been easy to understand the necessity of the improvement and related adoption.
Chapter 5, Enterprise Practices in Software Development, explains the enterprise practices in the software development life cycle with the popular ALM tools and techniques. After reading this chapter, the reader will know different ways to measure the performance of .NET Core applications and see how enterprises can create their own custom project templates using the .NET CLI tool.
Chapter 6, Layered Approach to Solution Architecture, teaches you a few best practices that can be used while designing n-tier architecture. We will implement a few patterns, such as Repository, Unit of Work, and Factory, in the data access layer that decouples the dependencies and uses them in business layer for database manipulation. We will explore certain benefits of keeping entities and other helper classes in the common layer, which can be used throughout the layers and, in the service layer, we will develop few controllers to show how business managers can be developed and injected. We will also learn how logging and exception handling can be implemented and, finally, in the presentation layer, we will use Angular 2 as a frontend framework to bring responsive user experience.
Chapter 7, SOA Implementation with .NET Core, talks about taking the top-down approach, taking you from theoretical aspects to implementation-related information. It introduces how to approach a SOA platform from an enterprise architecture perspective, how to model an architecture in step-by-step approach, and what elements to look for and take care of at the time of implementation of a SOA architecture.
Chapter 8, Cloud-Based Architecture and Integration with .NET Core, teaches you about cloud computing and using Microsoft Azure as the cloud platform. We will focus on Azure App Services and see how simply we can develop and deploy .NET Core applications on the cloud. Scalability is an essential key, and we will learn how easy it is to scale out or scale up our applications running on Azure following with the techniques to increase performance. Finally, you will learn about logging and monitoring options in Azure and see how we can use Application Insights with web applications running on the cloud to monitor application performance.
Chapter 9, Microservices Architecture, builds on SOA concepts and architectural artifacts and utilizes the right information from the cloud-based architecture and fits it to the right level to design the microservices-based architecture. We will design a high-level architecture using microservices and introduce you to some of the key elements from Azure-based offerings in order to design a sample serverless architecture.
Chapter 10, Security Practices with .NET Core, teaches you about the security frameworks ASP.NET Core Identity and IdentityServer4 in order to handle easy and complex scenarios, customize and extend the existing Identity model using Entity Framework Core, and use middleware to authenticate users using Facebook, 2FA, and OpenID Connect. Moreover, we will develop a basic Central Authentication System (CAS) that provides multiple applications to connect using the same protocol and implement single sign-on. You will also learn different techniques of securing Web API and MVC Controllers and Actions using attributes, or imperatively by writing custom code and then, finally, we will discuss how we can store application secrets using user secrets.
Chapter 11, Modern AI Offerings by Microsoft, explains the emerging architecture practices of the industry in a succinct and concise way with .NET Core environment. In the software industry, things can change quickly. You will learn DevOps concepts as well as the implementation of a simple microservices-based architecture in depth using Docker-based containers, and deploy them onto the Azure cloud using the relevant Azure offerings for the multi-container based implementation. The chapter covers virtual machines and containerization, Docker, DevOps, Continuous Integration and Continuous Delivery, sample app based on Docker containers, Big Data in Microsoft, Business Intelligence (BI), and an introduction to Artificial Intelligence (AI).
