When you're building such elaborate systems, you need specialists. Which means you--the architect--need to make your specialists work as a team. You need to make each specialist aware of how their piece fits into the larger system, and allow each expert maximum room for creativity while ensuring that they comply with quality standards and documentation rules. The best tool available for marshaling specialists toward a comprehensive .NET application of professional quality is Visual Studio .NET Enterprise Architect (VSEA). It gives project leads the tools they need to think big thoughts while remaining sufficiently close to the coding to ensure their proper implementation.

To begin, VSEA incorporates the new Visual Studio .NET development environment completely. All of the tools in Microsoft's latest IDE--code editor, debugger, object browser, database browser--are present in this edition. If you have implementation responsibilities of your own, or if you're one of those project leads who goes hands-on to solve low-level problems, VSEA provides you with the tools you need.

VSEA also ships with the goodies that come with Visual Studio Enterprise Developer: Visual SourceSafe and developer-licensed copies of Windows 2000 Advanced Server, SQL Server, Exchange Server, Commerce Server, and Host Integration Server. VSEA owners will get .NET Server when it's released. In addition, VSEA tops Enterprise Developer's offerings with a developer's edition of BizTalk Server.

There's also an attractive set of utilities for designing applications, roughing out application framework, and publishing standards for use by specialist programmers. This is where VSEA really shines, and where it earns its premium price. If you put the architectural tools to good use, your organization stands to realize a great return on investment in the form of increased team efficiency, higher quality, and satisfied deadlines.

VSEA allows you to use Microsoft Visio to design your applications and the databases that underlie them. It's true that you can generate Unified Modeling Language (UML) and database schematics in the standalone version of Visio Professional; but VSEA provides enormous time savings by allowing you to convert your diagrams into actual code. You can create a UML diagram in Visio, then use it to generate a code skeleton--all required class outlines, with inheritance, properties, and methods in place--in C++, C#, or Visual Basic. You can then publish the generated skeleton to your programming team for fleshing out. This is the role that Rational Visual Modeler plays (or used to play) for many developers.

Database modeling in VSEA is even cooler, because you can either export your schematic diagrams as Data Definition Language (DDL) code, or hook into an actual database server via an ODBC or OLE DB connection and generate the tables you've modeled in Visio. It's extraordinarily efficient. In fact, VSEA blurs the lines that have traditionally separated design, implementation, and documentation.

VSEA supports an XML-based language called Template Description Language (TDL), with which you can dictate characteristics of project files in more junior programmers's Visual Studio .NET environments. You can use TDL policies to turn off elements of the Visual Studio workspace, for example. Similarly, policies allow you to preset properties of code elements (such as database connections) that programmers can include as modules in their projects. You can also use TDL to describe the contents of team members's New Project windows, adding code snippets and reference materials alongside starter projects with policies attached.

Be aware that TDL policies may only be interpreted by users of Visual Studio .NET Enterprise Developer; they're not meaningful to users of standalone Visual Studio .NET. Also, be prepared to edit the TDL files manually, as Microsoft hasn't provided good tools for writing and modifying them. Setting up developer environments is a big job that has a huge effect on the later success of your project. It's sort of like tooling up a factory before a production run, so be prepared to spend some time setting policies, writing reference material, and configuring your TDL policies.

Is VSEA worthwhile? The answer depends in part on how well you set your policies, and on your development team's eagerness to use centrally managed reference materials and design advice. Embraced wholeheartedly by a large team, VSEA is not just the only show in town for team development of .NET applications--it's a powerful tool for realizing the vision of a software designer.