.Net Patterns Study Groups

I am wondering if there is current interest in .Net Patterns Study Groups?

At work, our team is planning to meet regularly to talk about some of the newer .Net Patterns books and ideas:

Martin Fowler's Patterns of Enterprise Application Architecture

Christian Thilmany's .Net .NET Patterns: Architecture, Design, and Process (mentioned previously)

Sten Sundblad and Per Sundblad's Design Patterns for Scalable Microsoft .Net Applications

and books found on Microsoft's Patterns and Practices site:

Application Architecture for .NET: Designing Applications and Services

Enterprise Solution Patterns Using Microsoft .NET

Shortly after the GoF Book (Design Patterns), Patterns Study Groups cropped up everywhere.  Now that .Net Patterns books have appeared, I haven't yet seen the same kind of interest.  Maybe it's still too early.  As far as online groups, I found a couple for .Net Patterns:  dotnet-patterns (Yahoo group) (doesn't seem like much activity here for awhile) and patterns-hyd (Yahoo group) (a group that deals with .Net and J2EE patterns). 

Even though the design patterns community had been around awhile (i.e. within the Smalltalk community), the GoF book was one of the first, and certainly the best, treatment of common software design patterns.  The GoF book was difficult to understand though, and developers got together to try to figure out what these guys were saying.  If nothing else, it helped solidify good architecture by building communities of developers talking about this stuff.  In some places, these groups are still going strong.

Today, I am wondering if there is interest among developers (in particular, .Net developers) for .Net Patterns study groups as there was with the GoF book?  What kind of group would this be?  At some of the User Groups I attend, I see more “presentation” style going on rather than “discussion”, so I don't think that would be the ideal place.  Granted, the interest may be limited mostly to the architecture wonks, but I would think many developers would benefit from groups like these.

Published Sunday, September 07, 2003 11:36 AM by RHurlbut
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Comments

Sunday, September 07, 2003 2:01 PM by Scott Galloway

# re: .Net Patterns Study Groups

It's fantastic the the .NET patterns community is finally building up a head of steam, I come from a J2EE background (amongst many others) where patterns are commonly used even in the simplest of applications. Just ask and J2EE developer what the MVC pattern is - then ask a .NET developer, you'll get very different answers - or none at all from the .NET developer. What's needed in my opionion is a simple approach to patterns, accessible by the 'normal' or beginner user, there's far too much of a focus on the enterprise developer with patterns.
The work-a-day developer should learn about Singletons, Proxies and View-Helper / Helper patterns at the least - not least because they're probably using them already and could save a lot of grief by finding out how others have solved the problems they may be having - the true reason for patterns in the first place!
Sunday, September 07, 2003 2:53 PM by Robert Hurlbut

# re: .Net Patterns Study Groups

Scott -- I agree. I know there are developers new to .Net coming from a non-OO background (i.e. VB, ASP, etc.) that would greatly benefit from simplified patterns information like that. Everyone benefits when we all speak the same "language". -)

And since you mentioned it, I believe the initial thrust for the .Net patterns community has come out of the J2EE patterns community. And we owe that community a big thank you. Authors like Fowler, Thilmany, and others (from a Java/J2EE background) have done a great service to the .Net community to re-interpret common design patterns into the architecture, design and implemenation of .Net.

My hope, like yours, is that we will continue to see the .Net patterns community grow.
Sunday, September 07, 2003 4:14 PM by Sam Gentile

# re: .Net Patterns Study Groups

Actually some of us ".NET people" have been using patterns every day in our designs for years since they actually predate Java by quite a bit. The design patterns community started with Kent Beck, Ralph Johnson and Smalltalk before Java was even invented.
Sunday, September 07, 2003 5:04 PM by Robert Hurlbut

# re: .Net Patterns Study Groups

Thanks Sam. It was implied before, but more explicitely stated now.

Enjoying Vermont this weekend?
Sunday, September 07, 2003 8:21 PM by DonXML

# re: .Net Patterns Study Groups

Funny you should mention this topic. Last Thursday I had a discussion with the CEO of SetFocus (a local NJ .Net training company), and he was talking about looking to add some .Net Patterns and Practices classes to his training school. So it is diffenitely catching on.

DonXML
Monday, September 08, 2003 3:34 AM by senkwe

# re: .Net Patterns Study Groups

Hmm, Sam Gentile seems very reserved in his comment. I could have sworn I saw him ridicule the concept of a book on "design patterns in C#" or something like that. I tend to agree by the way (knowing what I think I know about Design Patterns), but seeing as I don't own a copy of GoF, I'd probably be interested in Christian Thilmany's book in any case :-)
Monday, September 08, 2003 4:08 AM by TrackBack

# Link Interface 11.

Monday, September 08, 2003 5:50 AM by Robert Hurlbut

# re: .Net Patterns Study Groups

Actually Sam criticized that book specifically (see http://samgentile.com/blog/posts/7306.aspx), not Patterns in .Net generally. To give credit where its due, Sam was the one who mentioned Thilmany's book to me first as being in the same patterns series from Addison Wesley as the GoF book.

Another book to check out (as Sam mentioned in his comments in that earlier post) is "Design Patterns Explained: A new perspective on OO Design" by Alan Shalloway and James Trott. This gives "cliff-notes" version to the GoF book -- highly recommended.
Tuesday, September 09, 2003 10:23 PM by Sam Gentile

# re: .Net Patterns Study Groups

Thanks Robert. Apparently some people have a hard time reading.
Saturday, September 20, 2003 9:47 AM by TrackBack

# Security, Architecture, and Unit Testing

Friday, September 26, 2003 5:40 PM by Matt X.

# re: .Net Patterns Study Groups

Have you actually read Thilmany's book. Complete garbage. Terribly edited and presented and ALL of the middle tier patterns are just not appropriate for using with web services.

In general though I would love to study .NET patterns... But good ones please.
Friday, September 26, 2003 10:17 PM by Robert Hurlbut

# re: .Net Patterns Study Groups

Matt: At the time of this post, I had read parts of the book that were of most interest to me. Feel free to contact me directly if you would like to continue a discussion of the best design patterns for .Net, in particular for web services. I am open to ideas and suggestions.
Wednesday, October 01, 2003 10:31 AM by TrackBack

# .Net Patterns Study continued

Thursday, November 18, 2004 5:10 PM by TrackBack

# Revisiting .NET Patterns Study Groups

Wednesday, December 22, 2004 2:37 PM by TrackBack

# Announcing - Boston Code Brew