A common question that we get is "What will it take to change my existing .NET application to work on SaaSGrid?"

The answer depends on these factors:

  • The current architectural structure of your application and how closely it matches that of SaaSGrid's required structure.
  • How your application currently handles functionality that SaaSGrid's platform offers for you, such as authentication, roles, purchasing, subscription management, etc.

In this article, I will briefly describe each of these items which will serve as a starting point for understanding what it will take to make your application work on SaaSGrid.

Application Structure

SaaSGrid applications are physical divided into the following 3 components, explained in further detail below:

  • Data Persistence
  • Business Logic
  • User Interface

The data persistence layer (if required for your application) can consist of any standard database elements such as tables, views, etc. You may have exactly one database & schema per application.

The business logic layer consists of one or more WCF-based web services. The web services encapsulate your business logic, are consumed by your user interface(s) or other services, and are responsible for interactions with the data persistence layer. Interactions with the data persistence layer must be in a "provider agnostic way" meaning that your database connections are established via a factory that relies on configured preferences.

The user interface layer (if required for your application) consists of one or more ASP.Net or Silverlight applications that consume the web services from the business logic layer. The user interface cannot access the data persistence layer.

Structuring your application in this way permits us to scale out and deploy your application components as your customer base grows, and permits us to establish multi-tenancy for your application without your needing to incorporate this into your application design.

SaaSGrid's Feature Set

SaaSGrid offers a wide array of features and an API to take full advantage of them, which up until now would typically be handled to some extent by an existing application. This includes aspects such as multi-tenancy, billing, user & role management, access control, feature usage monitoring, and much more. These generally can be divided into two categories:

  • Features that SaaSGrid handles completely but may exist in your application, such as creating a user, authentication, and billing.
  • Features that SaaSGrid provides that are tapped via the SaaSGrid API when developing your application, such as securable checks and feature usage monitoring.

Where there is feature overlap, it may be necessary to remove or change code and your data model to work with SaaSGrid. Generally speaking, the more overlap your application has with SaaSGrid's feature set, the more work is required to modify your application to use SaaSGrid and its API. Of course, this all depends on the complexity of your application and its requirements. 

In conclusion, this information gives you a better idea of what it takes to get your application working on SaaSGrid, but please also take a look at the following references which can help provide some additional insight:

  • SaaSGrid Platform Page - an introduction to the features of SaaSGrid
  • SaaSGrid Quickstart - leads you through a basic example to familiarize yourself with SaaSGrid concepts and the SaaSGrid API
  • Downloads page - contains code samples, the SDK, and other documentation
  • Demo - a great way to familiarize yourself with the SaaSGrid's features and capabilities (contact your sales contact for more info)

If you have any additional questions please post in our developer forums.