Distributed System Designer Components

The VSTS Distributed System Designer is composed of four modeling tools. The Application Designer allows developers to build an application by selecting from a set of building blocks (such as an ASP.NET Web service), dropping them on a design surface, and then specifying the ways those components communicate with each other. A developer can then use the System Designer to identify portions of the application that can be grouped into units (known as “systems”) that must be deployed together as a single unit to work properly. These systems can then be reused across multiple applications.

The Logical Datacenter Designer allows developers or IT professionals to create a model of their standard data center environment. The data center model doesn’t include information on specific servers, but rather includes information on the types of servers found in the data center (e.g., Web server, database server) and the ways they are configured, depending upon their role. For example, a Web server that is on the public Internet is typically configured with much stricter security settings than one on the internal network.