Patterns and frameworks

Many people, when they first start to study design patterns (usually in university), dive into the ‘Gang-of-four’ reference book and if they have the energy to read it all, in the end they think something like: ‘well, very cool and interesting, I understood some of them, and maybe if I am lucky I will encounter projects interesting enough to actually use some of them’.. 🙂
It’s a normal reaction: unless you have a lot of experience in many real-world projects, you might never deliberately used, or realized that you used many of those patterns.

And here is a point that many people miss: design pattern, when they are really understood, might help somebody not only to improve it’s own code, but also to understand how and why the code in many frameworks and libraries is designed the way it is.
We don’t have to look any further than what we use every day – the .NET Framework. Here are some examples, in no particular order; I won’t explain each pattern, nor how it’s used in each case:

Decorator: I/O streams: Stream (the common ‘interface’), FileStream (concrete/component class), StreamReader, BufferedStream, CryptoStream (decorators)
and of course the Decorator class from WPF
Iterator: IEnumerator (generic iterator interface), IEnumerable (aggregator in GoF book), List (or any other collection), yield keyword
Observer: EventHandler delegate (abstract observer), any class exposing an event handler, like Button (concrete subject)
or IObserver/IObservable use in Reactive Extensions.
Abstract factory and bridge patterns: ASP.NET WebForms or ADO.NET providers (DbProviderFactory) – introduced in .NET 2.0
Factory: WebRequest.Create() method
Template method: many places, like ASP.NET WebForms Control class protected methods: OnLoad, OnInit, OnDataBinding etc..
Command: in WPF: ICommand, ICommandSource, RoutedCommand, or Action class in Java Swing or Delphi VCL
Facade: ApplicationUserManager from ASP.NET Identity framework
Flyweight: string interning, WPF dependency properties
Adapter: each time we use COM components from .NET or DataAdapter used in ADO.NET/DataSet world
Strategy: IComparer interface used in many sorting and searching methods in the framework
Composite: CompositeControl or Component base class and all it’s derived classes used in WinForms, ADO.NET etc..
Proxy: obviously, the proxy classes used in WCF or .NET Remoting clients
Interpreter: System.Linq.Expressions.Expression and it’s derived classes (also an example of composite pattern)
Memento: .NET serializable clases
Visitor : System.Linq.Expressions.ExpressionVisitor

These are just some random examples and maybe there are many more.
What’s the point in knowing this: when learning a new framework, if you identify a pattern, it’s easy to answer the question: ‘why the heck did they do it like this?’ 🙂

Many more patterns can be found in Fowler book (‘Patterns of Enterprise Application Architecture’), but maybe I’ll talk about those in a next episode..

Source: http://pixabay.com/en/mandelbrot-fractal-abstract-293454/
Author: Irina Pechkareva

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