Microsoft® .NET: Architecting Applications for the Enterprise

Appendix A. Final Thoughts

The pessimist complains about the wind; the optimist expects it to change; the realist adjusts the sails.

— William Arthur Ward

Now that you made it this far, do you feel like a better informed professional? We definitely hope so, and we certainly did work hard to put into this book the best content we could. We call ourselves architects, and we design systems for customers and help customers build and improve their own systems. Nobody has time to do it right the first time, but there is always time to fix it when it doesn’t work. So we also often fix existing systems.

A number of jokes and urban legends circulate about architects being more concerned with playing golf, talking in UML, or washing their hands after hitting ...