Ask any CEO about his concerns and, sure as day, he will list among them: How can I get my products to the market sooner than my competitors? How can I speed up my internal processes to meet the increasing demands of customers? How easily can I integrate my systems with those of an external partner? Do I have the ability to adapt to changes in the marketplace? Will I be able tomorrow to handle ten times the customers that I do today? Will I be able to always keep my systems running smooth as clockwork? To survive in an increasingly networked world, enterprises today need skills that range from the speed of a Formula 1 driver to the flexibility of a contortionist to the stamina of a long-distance runner.

How can companies acquire this combination of skills? The answer is technology frameworks.

Technology frameworks such as the Mastek .Net Framework (MDF) are the essential building blocks for large, complex enterprise-wide Internet scale systems that drive successful businesses today. They are the bedrock on which different applications built by large teams of programmers, designers and architects fit seamlessly together.

Designing enterprise class systems from scratch for today's heterogeneous computing environments can be a prohibitively expensive and long drawn out affair. Resources are scarce and time is short. Frameworks reduce both the time and costs to deploy new systems by eliminating the need to reinvent the wheel. F rameworks derive from the collective experience of the software development community and, therefore, encapsulate recurring core concepts and components that are cornerstones of good systems.

This Guide aims to provide an in-depth understanding of the Mastek .Net Framework and show how using a framework can add enormous value to your application development efforts.