Overview of Distributed System Designers 

In Visual Studio Team Edition for Architects, Distributed System Designers are an integrated set of graphical designers that help application architects, developers, and infrastructure architects achieve the following high-level goals:

• Document, visualize, and communicate application design and datacenter run-time environments.

• Design distributed application systems for deployment.

• Evaluate deployment of application systems in the target datacenter.

• Maintain and synchronize application design diagrams with source code.

Distributed System Designers help achieve these goals by supporting the following software development processes:

• Design, configure, and implement reusable applications for composing application systems.

• Compose application systems to use in distributed system scenarios.

• Represent run-time environments as logical datacenters.

• Define and validate deployment for applications and application systems against logical datacenters.

To support these processes, Distributed System Designers makes it possible for architects and developers to perform the following high-level tasks:

• Application Designer

  Design, visualize, configure, and implement applications in the development environment. For more information, see Designing Applications with Application Designer.

• Web Service Details window

  Design and review Web service operations. For more information, see Defining ASP.NET Applications on Application Diagrams.

• Class Designer

  Design common type system (CTS) classes visually. For more information, see Designing and Viewing Classes and Types.

• Settings and Constraints Editor

  Specify application and logical server settings and constraints. For more information, see Settings and Constraints Editor.

• System Designer

  Design application systems from applications and other systems. For more information, see Designing Application Systems with System Designer.

• Logical Datacenter Designer

  Represent run-time environments as logical datacenters. For more information, see Representing Datacenters with Logical Datacenter Designer.

• Deployment Designer

  Define and validate deployment definitions for applications and application systems. For more information, see Evaluating System Deployment with Deployment Designer.

Distributed System Designers use the System Definition Model (SDM) as its underlying metamodel. SDM supports the Dynamic Systems Initiative (DSI) in simplifying and automating how enterprises design, deploy, and operate distributed systems. For more information, see Overview of the System Definition Model (SDM) and visit the Visual Studio Team Edition for Architects site on MSDN online at https://go.microsoft.com/fwlink/?LinkId=49522.

See Also

Other Resources

Distributed System Designer Walkthroughs
Getting Started with Distributed System Designers