.NET and Data Modeling

When a web development agency approaches a new website implementation on behalf of a client, they must bring a surprisingly wide set of expertise into play.

Web site development is not just about programming or visual design

Developing large, highly developed web sites generally requires extensive process gathering information in regards to detailed requirements. Quite often this involves identifying and learning a considerable amount of business rules to be captured as requirements, and garnering hundreds of functional requirements for the system development.

To ensure the project’s success, clients need to know and understand each and every one of the requirements, their importance, and role within the overall web site.

Software engineering in addition to database design and development are each an art and science –technical specialists require significant training and experience to do them well.

Technical specialists also require the best breed tools in order to produce quality work. Microsoft’s SQL Server with Configuration Manager provides database developers and software engineers with an instrument which allows them to improve computer-aided systems and software development for the implementation of relational database systems designed using industry standard modeling practices like entity-relationship modeling and object-modeling.

Data design and modeling techniques such as entity relationship modeling were developed in the commercial, research and development hothouse of the nascent computer age in the early days of Silicon Valley in the 1970s.

Scientists like IBM’s Edgar Codd, whose data normalisation technique and rigorous approach to ER modeling set the profile for data modeling practices today, were faced with the problems of how to effectively map real world problems and the items associated with them into database solutions.

These same challenges are real today – but easily executed with tools produced by Microsoft.

Through the course of the 80’s and 90’s many advancements were made in database science, and object-oriented database technologies came into their own. However, relational database systems are still the foundation for most commercial applications.

Microsoft produces a host of tools to enable the smooth, effective implementation of relational databases, and Microsoft’s .NET technologies to allow smart, seamless integration of web sites with such databases.