Application Designer Terminology 

In Distributed System Designers, you can use Application Designer to design service-oriented applications. Application Designer opens when you create a distributed system solution or add an application diagram to an existing solution. From the Toolbox, you can drag application prototypes to the application diagram to define applications and endpoints. You can then connect application definitions through their endpoints, which represents how they are connected in the development environment. For more information, see Overview of Application Designer.

The following illustrations show Application Designer and the application diagram.

Application Designer

Application diagram

The following table introduces terminology associated with Application Designer.

Term	Definition
Application diagram	The diagram used to visualize, define, connect, and configure applications in the solution. The application diagram (.ad) file contains information based on the System Definition Model (SDM). For more information, see the following topics: Overview of the System Definition Model (SDM) Relationships Between System Definition Model (SDM) Documents
Application definition	Defines an application that can provide or consume services. You can later design application systems composed from uses of these application definitions. You can constrain the types of logical servers to which an application can bind when defining deployment for a system. You can also apply settings to an application definition as well as configure constraints. For more information, see Overview of Applications on Application Diagrams.
Application endpoint	Defines a connection point at which an application provides or consumes a service and is of provider or consumer type, respectively. For example, an ASP.NET application might have a Web service provider endpoint that exposes operations that communicate using HTTP or SOAP protocols. For more information, see Defining Operations for ASP.NET Web Services. In addition, on application endpoints, you can constrain the types of logical server endpoints to which an application endpoint can bind when defining deployment for a system. You can also apply settings to an application endpoint as well as configure constraints. For more information, see Overview of Endpoints on Applications.
Connection	Represents how applications connect to each other in the development environment. For more information, see Communication Between Applications.
Application prototype	A preconfigured application definition in the Toolbox used to define applications on the application diagram. For example, you can drag the ASP.NETWebService prototype from the Toolbox to define an ASP.NET Web service application. You can also create custom prototypes. For more information, see the following topics: Application Types and Prototypes for Defining Applications How to: Create Application Prototypes from Configured Applications and Endpoints

See Also

Reference

Web Service Details Window Terminology
Settings and Constraints Editor Terminology

Concepts

Overview of Distributed System Designers
Workflow Across Distributed System Designers
Distributed System Designers Terminology Overview