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Software Alchemy

The Art and Science of Software Development

Persistence, Tenancy, and the Data Model

In this blog entry we will evolve our solution and the data model behind it, so that we can begin to see how user requests and interactions operate against a multitenant system. We’ll start by refactoring the persistence interfaces and implementations to make the solution more scalable in a split-stack CQRS architecture. Alongside this change, I’ll show you how you can use both Dapper and Entity Framework Core inside a single transaction/unit of work. Then we’ll add some new EF Core entities corresponding to the tenants and customers of our SaaS product. Finally, we’ll perform some cleanup across the data model classes so that the Persistence layer is more robust.

Authentication and Identity

In this entry, we’ll start to add in more structural elements, namely the authentication components of the UI and Identity Model classes in our Web API. Fortunately, ASP.NET Core and Visual Studio do a lot of this work for us via scaffolding tools. Our main concern is to take this auto-generated code, modify it where needed, and move it into the appropriate layers of our Clean Architecture solution, namely the Infrastructure and Presentation layers.

Architectural Template

This is the first in a multi-part series in which I will be building off the Foundational Concepts Series. My objective is to present actual, procedural steps that you can follow and apply to your own web projects using ASP.NET Core. As I present these steps, I will be updating the demo application accordingly, the goal being to evolve it into a working web application by the end of this series.

My objective is to demonstrate that Clean Domain-Driven Design works in modern web applications built on the ASP.NET Core stack. The desired end-product will be a multi-tenant SaaS product which can scale to accommodate complex business logic. I intend to revisit different areas of functionality in future blog series’, at which point we can make it more robust and enterprise worthy.

Architectural Template

This is an architectural template for building web applications which is based upon my interpretation of the Clean DDD and CQRS concepts that I introduced in the previous entry. To demonstrate this, I've created a demo application which attempts to solve a fictional problem for a fake organization. In developing this template, I studied solutions and tutorials from a handful of experts.

Clean Architecture

In this blog entry I give a primer on Clean Architecture, which is a modern, scalable formal software architecture which is appropriate for modern web applications. Next, I discuss how Domain-Driven Design fits into this picture, and how DDD concepts dovetail nicely into Clean Architecture, producing a methodology called Clean DDD. Finally, I introduce Command Query Responsibility Segregation (CQRS), and describe how it complements and enhances Clean DDD solutions to create software systems that are elegant, robust, scalable, and testable.