1.4. Summary

This chapter focused on presenting the business problem that will be solved by the application developed throughout this book. Each chapter dissects a part of the problem and discusses the design and the code in great detail, ultimately solving the problem. The goal is to give you a framework that you can use and enhance in your own applications to meet the requirements for your next application. Imagine how nice it would be to be able to start your next project with a complete set of controls, classes, stored procedures, and a data model for role-based security, reporting, dynamic queries, auditing, dynamic menus, and workflow — especially workflow! How many applications out there have approval processes? The workflow pattern defined in this book could be used by many applications for a variety of departments in your company. HR could have a hiring workflow, application development could have an issue-tracking workflow, finance could have a capital expenditure workflow, and the list goes on and on. I am excited to share my experience with you and I look forward to the feedback readers provide about how they have used this framework and improved upon it.

The adventure begins in the next chapter with an exploration of a new feature in Visual Studio 2008 called LINQ to SQL. You'll learn all about how you can incorporate LINQ in your data access layer to avoid a tremendous amount of repetitive code for making calls to the database. In addition, you'll never have to write another custom entity class again to pass data back to the business logic layer. It's all built into LINQ to SQL. Happy coding, my friend!