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Windows DNA - Relevance

Where would Windows DNA be relevant to us?

Customers want these services:

Read on to find out what DNA is all about.

What is it and what is it not?

Windows DNA is not a solution: it is a methodology propounded by Microsoft for building web enabled applications.

Overall, the DNA methodology is an umbrella term that covers many existing technologies to help us design and implement robust, distributed applications. It visualizes this whole application as a series of tiers, with the client at the top and the data store at the bottom. The core of DNA is the use of business objects in a middle tier of the application, and this is supported by two solutions: Microsoft Transaction Server (MTS), which is the component manager offering full transaction support; and Microsoft Message Queue Server (MSMQ), which provides the fault-tolerance required in a distributed application.

Windows DNA is like a map to help developers, technology planners, and IS managers avoid getting lost in the details of Microsoft's many operating systems, tools, technologies, and applications.

Windows DNA, at its core, is about integrating Web and client-server models of computing.

Explore this a little and get a glimpse of what the model comes down to.

Windows DNA building blocks

Another way of phrasing the same question is "What are the technologies that make up the building blocks for Windows DNA?"

Here are the basic technologies:

Here is approximately what it takes to round off the basic technology skills:

We in Calsoft Labs have considerable expertise in most of the supporting technologies.

Basic Facts on Windows DNA

In DNA, business objects are implemented as software components. These components can be accessed by the client interface application or by another component, and can themselves call on other components, data stores, etc. Componentization of business rules brings many benefits, such as easier maintenance, encapsulation of the rules, protection of intellectual copyright, etc.

DNA is an approach to design that can speed up overall development time, while creating more reliable and fault tolerant applications that are easily distributable over a whole variety of networks. In this book, we're concentrating on the Internet, using TCP/IP as our protocol. However, the components can just as easily be used with compiled applications specially written to follow the DNA principles.

More Details on DNA: Windows DNA services

DNA centers around a set of services that are provided by Windows NT Server. These include both application and infrastructure services. The infrastructure services are provided by Windows NT Server itself, and consist of things like the Network service, the NT5 Active Directory service, the Remote File and Print service, the Security service and various other Component services that don't easily fall into one of these categories

What DNA means is that each of these services provides a common and easily accessible interface through which other components and scripts can access them. There is no 'natural' language, and developers use whichever language best suits their particular requirements. And, because the interfaces are published and open, independent (non-Microsoft) suppliers can create components and services of their own which can 'plug into' NT Server.

An important benefit: Scalability

The most important feature of DNA is probably scalability - which has been one of the major factors blocking adoption of Windows NT in corporate environments.

Scalability is particularly important in a Web environment, where popular sites can attract thousands of visitors per day. It's a lot harder to plan capacity in this environment than on a local area network with a fixed number of users and a stable traffic pattern. To get round this, one of the new services supplied with Windows NT Server is the Microsoft Transaction Server (MTS). As we'll see in later chapters, this can bring benefits to DNA-compliant applications in a number of different, and not always obvious, ways.

Microsoft promises that, using Windows DNA, the very same design and architecture needs to be employed regardless of whether the application will have 10 or 10000 concurrent users.

Trends that suggest we look seriously at Windows DNA

Here are some things one can speculate on:

One can even proceed a step further and suggest that Windows DNA might be the map to application developers (for Microsoft technologies, at the least) that will finally move software development from the coding-intensive framework to a paradigm oriented towards design and component-reuse.