In the late 1990s, author Rockford Lhotka wrote extensively on creating distributed, object-oriented Windows applications using Visual Basic 6, COM, and DCOM. The introduction of .NET has motivated him to revisit these themes and revise his strategy. In this book, he explains the changes introduced by .NET, the new possibilities that are emerging, and an essential tutorial on the best ways to make .NET work for you. This book is divided into three parts. In the first, Lhotka analyzes logical and physical application architectures, exploring their effect on scalability, fault tolerance, and performance. In the second, he implements and documents a Visual Basic .NET framework for the creation of distributed, object-oriented applications that employ .NET technologies including remoting, serialization, and auto-deployment. This framework encapsulates functionality such as database access, transaction handling, and location transparency. In the last part of the book, youll use the framework to create a sample application, and discover the ease with which you can write Windows, Web, and Web services interfaces for the underlying objects. In addition, this book contains the authors own Component-based, Scalable, Logical Architecture (CSLA .NET), an object-oriented framework that can act as the foundation for a diverse range of enterprise applications. By the end of the book, youll be free to examine, use, and modify this architecture for your own needs.