Question

I have to develop an application which fulfills following demands:

1. It has to be developed in .NET (C#/Visual Studio/Standalone windows application).

2. The first important requirement is the visualization and manipulation of graph data. Here I will use “ZedGraph” as I can tell for the moment.

3. The second requirement is a database connection. (SQL)

4. The database has to be accessible via the companies intranet.

5. Further some algorithmic functions have to be implemented in order to preprocess the given Graph-data before saving it to the database.

Certainly those are not all the requirements in detail but they briefly describe the main goals of the application.

Basicaly I could develop all the functions separately, drag & drop a GUI in Visual Studio’s designer’s, assign functionalities to the according GUI-elements etc.
But this somehow wouldn’t feel right. Especially for the following reasons:

• I want to keep the application as extensible as possible.

• It also should be maintainable

• I could thing of many more reasons but that are the two which first come to my mind…

So my question is whether somebody can provide me with references for software architecture which would fit to this kind of project.
Especially books are important, as the application is a part of my thesis, so every method and decision has to be justified with a reference.

Thanks in advance,
BC++

Answer 1

The Microsoft Application Architecture Guide

http://www.microsoft.com/download/en/details.aspx?id=16236