MCA, Again

Well, I decided again today to start working on my Microsoft Certified Architect credential.  It's been over a year already getting going on this, so I guess better late than never ;-)

This is prompted by some work I'm doing right now helping a client convert from J2EE to .NET, combined with some composite application work that I've been doing for another client.  So, I've been looking to get a framework together that can be used to articulate decisions that I make.

Like a lot of other things, there isn't a lot of documentation on this, so I figure I'll try to work on a template and that I should write about it here. 

But how to start?  Well, I've decided that I'm going to re-read the Application Architecture Guide 2.0 from MS Patterns and Practices.  It's a great reference for just this type of communication, and it sets out a lot of the things you need to think about as a software architect.

To start, I decided to recreate the diagram that is in the introduction that is used to describe the outline of the guide.  It is also a good diagram for showing various architectural components required in a system:


My posts over the next days, months (hopefully not years) will focus on explaining the parts of this diagram, as well as I'm sure extending the diagram as I see needed by applying it to several real world applications.  Anyway, I find that one of the best ways for me to remember things is to write them down (hence blogging), and I hope it is also useful for you.