New New Architecture Guide : MS Patterns and Practices

So finally MS has updated its official guide on application architecture, and it covers most forms of applications in use today, from RIA's to staid old client/server.

Read my post here for what i think of this valuable document originating from hallowed halls of patterns and practices.

About time, for ever since flurry of technical activity around ASP.NET AJAX and then Silverlight, and UX idioms coming from Web2.0 paradigm, things in the previous guide were a little out of whack.

That is MS own technology set allowed for, and infact was optimised for an architecture totally at variance with what was in the previous guide.

Don't know if you experienced it in any projects/products that might have been part of, but personally for me not having had MS official guidance updated was a big downer. A lot of what had to say, suggest, would be looked upon incongruously, and then be dismissed with, 'MS guidance does not say so'.

And most of this was while architecting a web application or a dot com.

Notice that there are two archetypes in the guide, one for a plain old vanilla Web Application, and another for an RIA. Also notice a subtle difference between them, which being presence of a service layer over business layer that presentation layer talks to. Now if one looked at the older guide, no way would you be able to validate this difference, even though since early release of ASP.NET AJAX, and WCF, technical set asked for something similar to what is now laid out as part of RIA archetype.

Thankfully the new guide has an archetype for RIA's as distinguished from that of a Web App, and guess all of above is set to change.

Also hopefully having these two archetypes will help, not only in bringing out variations in the two types to focus, but also for stakeholders and team members into knowing what is it that they are really making.
Guess a dotCom is surely a web application, but if it is desired to be a Web2.0 RIA, well then there is a difference in how it needs to be architected and designed.

Thus the guide would go a long way to both focus attention to this fact, and also in aligning thought processes and mindsets.

And yes,as the saying goes, better late than never.