Distributed System Designers in VSTS

The Visual Studio 2005 Team Architect edition provides four visual designers collectively known as the Distributed System Designers. These four visual designers are:

• Application Designer
• System Designer
• Logical Datacenter Designer
• Deployment Designer

Application Designer allows you to define the applications that comprise a distributed system. You can then use those application definitions in System Designer to compose applications into deployable systems. Following this, you can evaluate system deployment using Deployment Designer.

Independently, Logical Datacenter Designer allows you to define a logical representation of the target datacenter in which applications (composed into systems) will be deployed. Consequently, Deployment Designer takes as input not only a set of system definitions from System Designer, but also a set of logical server definitions from Logical Datacenter Designer.

Adopted from Tony Loton's article Introduction to the Visual Studio 2005 Application Designer, Part 1