CODEWITHSUNDEEP
asp.netwcfwifenterprise
Justavian
Justavian

Reputation: 143

General Structure for ASP.NET Enterprise(ish) App

I'm the custodian of a pretty sophisticated, yet antiquated, ASP.NET application. It is essentially a platform that makes creating database applications easier - with tools to read in database schemas, auto generate forms, reports, charts, and provide extremely extensive tools to manipulate those things within the UI. There are some pretty big clients using the platform for some niche applications, and despite the age of much of the code (some of it written as early as 2001), everything runs pretty well.

The company is doing well enough that i need to start considering a new version, and rather than plastering on some new features, i'd like to consider a fresh start. The current solution is a ridiculous 150 projects - down from about 220 when i first started working on this full time.

Does anyone have any tips or suggestions for the general structure of an enterprise(ish) level application? What new technologies should i consider? Maybe some particular books or websites i should review?

I've got a good handle on all of the specifics that make our platform so flexible - but because i've been locked into the general structure of our code for so long, i feel like i'm way out of touch with how the entire thing needs to be structured on a large scale. The current application still has a bunch of .NET Remoting for communication with the databases (just a tad out of date), and a ton of incredibly inefficient code written by someone who wasn't really a programmer.

WCF to serve info from the data access layer? WIF to authenticate? I'd really like to be able to assemble an API that my business partners can use to connect to the data and use a huge collection of common functions i've got set up - ideally that API could run in a web context or in some other environment.

I know this is a pretty big question that could have a lot of possible answers - just looking for some thoughts on where to really spend our research time.

Thanks!

-RP

Upvotes: 0

Views: 81

Answers (1)

rbrayb
rbrayb

Reputation: 46763

If you want to rid yourself of all the authentication / authorization hassles, absolutely go for claims-based applications, WIF, ADFS etc.

That's the Microsoft direction - CMS, SP. Office 365. Windows Azure AD etc. are all now claims-based.

Only problem is that ADFS authenticates against AD. Have a look at Identity Server for something DB related.

Plus ADFS via ACS provides Facebook, Google etc. logons.

Upvotes: 2

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