Chapter 10. Deploying and Maintaining the Application

Terms you'll need to understand:

• Setup projects and merge modules

• No-Touch Deployment

• Licensed components

• Side-by-side versioning

• Windows Management Instrumentation (WMI)

• Windows Management Instrumentation Query Language (WQL)

• Clustered and non-clustered indexes

• Horizontal and vertical partitioning

• Federated databases

• Denormalization

Techniques you'll need to master:

• Create Windows Installer deployment .msi files from Visual Studio .NET

• Store reusable deployment components in a merge module and include the module in a deployment project

• Store multiple versions of the same assembly in the Global Assembly Cache (GAC)

• Query system resources and processors to monitor performance

• Create an index schema and validate the design using the Index Tuning Wizard

• Create partitions for infrequently accessed data to increase overall performance

• Introduce redundant data into a data model if the increased performance outweighs the duplication

To promote business, a recliner manufacturer decided to guarantee all its products for five full years after the date of purchase. The guarantee entitled buyers to an onsite technician should the furniture malfunction. The recliner manufacturer had two retail stores in California and sold directly to its customers. During its fourth year, the recliner manufacturer began to notice a high number of international service requests. Most of the locations were so remote that a technician could not be contracted to repair the furniture, so the customer was issued a full refund. Upon further analysis, the recliner manufacturer discovered that one of its stores was within five miles of a large Air Force training base, and many of the customers in that area tended to relocate overseas. If the recliner manufacturer firm had done some market research before issuing the warranty, it could have predicted the high numbers of Air Force customers and added a clause to the warranty to exclude international service calls.

This example illustrates a deployment and maintenance plan that appeared logical and quite capable of generating income at first, but was erroneous and costly in the long run. Chapter 9, "Creating the Physical Design," explained creating the solution's physical design specifications, including schema definition for exceptions, caching, security, state management, logging, and service layer design. This chapter takes these specifications and extends them to create deployment, maintenance, and data infostructure physical specifications. After your design is fully created, you are going to validate the design to ensure thoroughness and feasibility.

As stated in Chapter 9, the physical design is not to be taken lightly or seen as something that's "nice to have" if time permits. The opportunity for failure increases when risks are not thoroughly researched before implementation. You can build the perfect solution, but when you lack necessary components for a correct deployment plan (such as data migration procedures), you might find you have little to no chance of project success.