Dmitry,

Most teams that I have worked with use VS.NET for both the UI and middle-tier. As far as the work getting completed, the separation of tiers should never cause a problem for separate development. The middle-tier developers work on the business objects without the need to know how the UI will be presented. These objects are usually done in advance of the UI and then the UI team(s) use the objects to build the functionality into the UI. When the middle-tier and UI teams need to develop at the same time, the middle-tier teams create stubs for the different functionality that the business objects will provide to allow the UI developers to make the approporiate calls. Then the middle-tier developers fill in the methods with code.

The big difference is that when you have robust separation of objects, you need to spend far more time in the planning stages, architecting your application to make sure that all functionality is in the right spot and will be provided. You don't want to be making lots of changes in the middle-tier that will affect how the UI is handled.

>Cathi,
>
>>What I am experiencing when working with some large sized companies is that they have entirely seperate teams that handle the UI and a different team that handles the middle-tier.
>>
>
>I am very curious on how large companies separate work on UI and the business tier. What tools do they typically use for UI tier? I presume they use VS.NET for business code (am I wrong?). How does the work gets coordinated between people who work on UI and business tier?