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Microsoft Releases SaaS Sample App
For those who are interested in Microsoft's plans for software as a service (SaaS), the company has published a sample application illustrating how it's done.
Microsoft late last week posted the SaaS sample application available on its SaaS Architecture Center on MSDN, according to an e-mail from a company spokesperson.
“The goal of the SaaS sample application is to illustrate the key architectural principles behind SaaS [which] . . . is an implementation of the guidance that the Microsoft architecture team has been publishing over the past year [providing] a reference application and accompanying source code,” the e-mail said.
LitwareHR is a fictitious human resources application providing recruitment-management software delivered as a service. It uses the .NET Framework 3.0 and SQL Server 2005, and implements single-instance multi-tenancy patterns.
SaaS is becoming an increasingly important component of Microsoft's software delivery model, and while the initial goal is to reach consumers, the company is not bashful that it intends to see the model spread to its enterprise customers as well. That point is hammered in by the title of a white paper posted on the SaaS Architecture Center site: “Building Distributed Applications -- Software as a Service (SaaS): An Enterprise Perspective.”
The sample application is located here.
About the Author
Stuart J. Johnston has covered technology, especially Microsoft, since February 1988 for InfoWorld, Computerworld, Information Week, and PC World, as well as for Enterprise Developer, XML & Web Services, and .NET magazines.