Architecture/Design/Patterns

Agile Principles, Patterns, and Practices in C# by Robert C. Martin and Micah Martin describes how to write software using C#. Book covers also most important design patterns and object-oriented development principles. There are very good, close to reality examples for every topic and that makes this book pretty easy to read and understand.

Analysis Patterns: Reusable Object Models is another create patterns book by Martin Fowler. The audience of this book are analysts whose work is analysis of information systems and modeling data structures. This book is also recommended reading for programmers and software designers.

Couple of years ago I brought two books for my company. Today I can say that I made a small investment that still works pretty well. These books are titled as The Data Model Reosurce Book and author of these books is Len Silverston.

Tests tell us if our software works as expected. But they tell us almost nothing about side effects of technical environment where system lives. We can face different problems when test users start testing system in their environment and we want to be ready to react fast to all problems. To get information about system’s work we need advanced logging.

Loggers are one of most popular examples about interfaces for sure. And there are a lot of implementations of loggers. Some implementations are simple and yet powerful, some implementations may be more complex. All we have to is to select implementation we need and integrate it to our application. It seems like good idea at first place but as soon as we need to switch from one implementation to another we discover nasty dependencies we have to change in all places where we are logging. Let’s see how to avoid these dependencies.

Building up a good business library is art. Because every bad decision made early will eat project's time later. Bad decisions will also waste many time of developers who have to use this library in their work. One of the most common mistakes made is mixing DAL functionality to business objects. At first it may seems like a good idea - why not have a smart objects? - but as project goes this solution causes more and more problems. And, be warned, each next problem is worst than previous.

I will continue my little serie about anti-patterns of decisions and activities that may screw up projects and make developers (and why not also others) life hell. Now let's look at silver bullet anti-pattern. It is about using unknown tools and technologies in the place where one shouldn't never do that.

I had to write one data import/export utility that moved data from one database to another. Once I was finished the first round of coding I found one thing that needed refactoring - the import/export process wasn't generalized. It was part of importer/exporter utility main class (it was console application). After some refactoring I got some common things to use in other tasks like this.