The website under development includes a set of modules: articles, forums, shopping cart, etc … Logically speaking a separate chapter should be included to decide on the general architectural implementation that should be used through out all the module development and that is what the author have done in this chapter. The website will be a multilayered application where the User Interface, Business, and Data Access layer will be clearly separated.

The similar approach to the new Provider Model in ASP.NET 2.0 will be used so that the website can be easily configured to run with several data stores.

A decision has been taken to use custom entities and domain objects in favor of Datasets/Datatables. A nice discussion in this chapter goes on this topic. You want to know about it? OK, buy the book first and go to chapter 3 J.

In addition, stored procedures will be used to access the database in favor to storing the queries as simple text inside the DAL, mainly in all the modules, except in some places when there is a need to retrieve data and apply both pagination and dynamic sorting, in that case text queries will be used instead.

Finally, different architectural issues on the business layer side were discussed including: Caching, handling Transactions, Configuration Sections, Configuration Elements, and Health Monitoring.

GridView, DetailsView, FormView, SqlDataSource and ObjectDataSource were also introduced as a means to facilitate the UI work later on.