That statement leaves a considerable amount of room for confusion. What is a "platform"? What are "related products"? Even the term distributed computing has been given various definitions.

It's worth the effort to sort out the confusion because multi-tier architectures like DNA are widely regarded as the future of large-scale development. As we will see in this chapter, such architectures offer significant benefits in the construction of mission-critical and enterprise-scale systems. This book will introduce and overview, just about everything you want to know about building modern, forward-looking applications for Windows. The Windows DNA architecture is a blueprint and set of guidelines for doing this.

Before we can begin, however, we need to examine a few concepts. When we talk about modern applications, we are almost always talking about network applications. It's rare to develop an application today that does not either make use of distributed resources or incorporate technologies developed for the Web. Even standalone desktop applications make use of techniques and technologies influenced by distributed programming, such as data source abstraction and component development.

In this chapter, we'll look at:

• The nature of modern, networked applications, and a brief review of the history that brought us to the current state of software development
• What we want to get out of an application, and the inherent problems we need to overcome when designing distributed applications
• The goals that Windows DNA is designed to tackle over and above other architectures

Before we embark on our voyage through Windows DNA, let's examine the nature and needs of a modern application. Building such applications is what Windows DNA is about.