Thursday, February 08, 2007

Patterns and Practice Software Factories

The consulting company I work for only does projects and we do all the work in our office. sometimes, people need to work on multiple projects at one time. A problem that arises is that from one project to the next, the solution infrastructure varies, sometime a lot and there is a cost to get the developer comfortable with the project. The cost is mainly in productivity hours. We have been talking about coming up with standard ways to do projects and from a very top level we have a good process, things like unit testing, coding standards, peer reviews, continuous builds, and what not. What we don't have is a good solution template or anything to enforce certain patterns we like to use as a project grows.

So in my spare time I have been trying to find a solution to this problem, at least from the DotNet side of our practice. I came across a four software factories offered at Patterns & Practice website. The software factories are Smart Client, Web Service, Mobile, and Web Client. These factories use the composite patten for UI loading. It also forces a MVC Pattern or what they call a MVP pattern for creating and developing forms and web pages. The factories are also very extensible and supports many different frameworks like for example NUnit, and the VSTS tests. You can use all the other application blocks with the solutions.

I will be posting more about the factories as I start using them more in my spare time. I do know that in the few little test apps I did the wiring of UI and passing of events between forms, controls and other objects is simple.

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