Pro WCF 4: Practical Microsoft SOA Implementation, Second Edition

Chapter 11. Working with Data

Data is the most important part of an application. Almost every application needs to operate on data—whether it's creating, consuming, or processing data. Without data, almost all applications would be useless. You can use many patterns when designing applications to work with data. In the early days of client-server applications, a favorite approach was the n-tier approach, where the application was divided into n tiers (the most common division was three tiers). In the three-tier approach, the first tier is the presentation tier, which handles all the presentation of the application (the UI), and is essentially what the user interacts with. The next tier is the business layer, which contains all the business rules ...