Architecture

MSDN has an excellent section on Architecting ASP.NET Applications.

• patterns & practices' Web Client Software Factory on CodePlex! - This factory will provide comprehensive architecture guidance to help customers build web solutions using the Microsoft platform.
• One Day in the Life of an ASP.NET Web Page - Explore the eventing model built around ASP.NET Web pages and the various stages that a Web page experiences on its way to HTML. Discover the events that characterize the lifecycle of page and how control and page authors can intervene to alter the standard behavior.
• The ASP.NET HTTP Runtime - Dino Esposito looks at the constituent components of the HTTP runtime, the logic that drives the processing of individual requests directed to ASP.NET applications, and shows all the steps by which a HTTP request becomes plain HTML text.
• Form-based Programming in ASP.NET - Tips for forms programming.
• Basic Instincts: Server-Side Generation of Word 2007 Docs - Learn how to read, write, and generate Word, Excel, and PowerPoint documents on the server without running Office.
• The Architecture Journal - The Architecture Journal is an independent platform for free thinkers and practitioners of IT architecture. The Issue 12 is related to Web Architecture.

Starter Kits

A great way to learn about software architecture is to look at how other applications have been built. There are a number of great community supported Starter Kits like:

• DotNetNuke Starter Kit - DotNetNuke is a Web Application Framework ideal for creating and deploying projects such as commercial web sites, corporate intranets and extranets, online publishing portals, and custom vertical applications.
• BlogEngine.NET Starter Kit - BlogEngine.NET is a full-featured blogging platform that is a breeze to set up, customize, and use. BlogEngine.NET works with your choice of data source; you may use SQL Server, or you may take the plug’n’play approach using XML files.
• dasBlog - dasBlog is a blogging engine that offers elegant visual aesthetics, powerful easy to use features, and a unique application architecture. dasBlog requires no database engine, using file-based content management with an architecture that ensures excellent performance.
• Subtext - Subtext is a personal blog publishing platform that focuses on usability, elegance, and simplicity. If you’ve ever caught yourself throwing your hands in the air and declaring that you’re going to write your own blogging engine, then Subtext is for you.
• Employee Info Starter Kit - This is a starter kit, which includes very simple user requirements, where we can create, read, update and delete (crud) the employee info of a company. The primary purpose of this starter kit is, to provide a solid guideline with respect to building enterprise level projects, by utilizing new asp.net 2.0 and sql server 2005 features, as well as latest best coding practices. The starter kit includes several cases where we can perform multi-table joining and/or write operations. Combining high performance and security features this starter kit shows how we can solve in real world problems and challenges, from a wide range of view point.

Podcasts

• Ron Jacob's ARCCast - Keeping up on the latest trends in architecture is hard. With new products and technologies constantly flowing from Microsoft you need someone who can cut through the fluff and get to the bottom line.
• Software Architecture with Dan Appleman -  Scott Hanselman chats about software architecture with Dan Appleman.

Sample Enterprise Applications

• Microsoft .NET Pet Shop 4 - The .NET Pet Shop application is designed to show the best practices for building enterprise, n-tier .NET 2.0 applications that may need to support a variety of database platforms and deployment scenarios.
• DinnerNow - DinnerNow is a fictitious marketplace where customers can order food from local restaurants for delivery to their home or office. This sample is designed to demonstrate how you can develop a connected application using several new Microsoft technologies.
  The demo utilizes several technologies including: IIS7, ASP.NET Ajax Extensions, LINQ, Windows Communication Foundation, Windows Workflow Foundation, Windows Presentation Foundation, Windows PowerShell, and the .NET Compact Framework.
• .NET StockTrader Sample Application - This application is an end-to-end sample application for .NET Enterprise Application Server technologies. It is a service-oriented application based on Windows Communication Foundation (.NET 3.0) and ASP.NET, and illustrates many of the .NET enterprise development technologies for building highly scalable, rich "enterprise-connected" applications. It is designed as a benchmark kit to illustrate alternative technologies within .NET and their relative performance.
• Microsoft TownHall - TownHall provides a cloud-hosted (Azure) solution in a low-cost, low-friction fashion. TownHall, with its multitude of existing and planned clients, allows organizations to engage individuals on whatever device they may be using at a given moment.

Videos

• Microsoft Architecture: Design Enterprise-Class Systems with .NET Framework 2.0
• No Spin Architecture - Webcast series for aspiring architects
• Aspiring Software Architect Program (ASAP)  Introduction to ASAP for Application Architects followed by role of architects during the Requirements phase. This session is about how architects can influence better decisions that can pay dividends at the end of the project. In the session, we will discuss what are the project types, where to begin the capture, how it differs in different project types and execution models, how do we collate, prioritize and present the requirements. We end with a Case Study example to understand the approach.
• Aspiring Architect Series 2008
  

P & P Architecture Guides

• Application Architecture for .NET: Designing Applications and Services
  This guide provides architecture-level and design-level guidance for application architects and developers that need to build distributed solutions with the Microsoft® .NET Framework. This guide assumes you are familiar with .NET component development and the basic principles of a layered distributed application design. This guide is most critical to those that architect and design applications or services; recommend appropriate technologies and products for applications or services; make design decisions to meet functional and nonfunctional requirements; or choose appropriate communications mechanisms for applications or services.

Beginners Articles

• Building Layered Web Applications with Microsoft ASP.NET 2.0
  An excellent introduction for beginners showing the fundamentals involved in architecting an application using the Custom Business Entities approach. Written by Wrox author, Imar Spaanjaars.
• Traceability in Layered Architecture: A Roadmap
  Traceability in layered architecture lets software architects to define, utilize, reuse and re-engineer existing, current and future application architecture in more structured way. This article provides a roadmap to trace multi-layer architectures easily.

Application Modeling

• .NET Application Modeling Language (nAML) Specification and Tool
  Understanding the architecture and code in software application plays as major factor while building good software products. Along with specification, examples and tools, a new visual modeling technique being introduced here, termed as “nAML” (.NET Application Modeling Language), which overcomes the limitation of typical modeling languages in a revolutionary way! Nothing much to say, just download it and you can get to know how POWERFUL it is!