.Net Provider Pattern - Designing decoupled and extensible Component for .Net Application
Provider design pattern of .Net Framework 2.0 facilitates an approach to design components in a decoupled and extensible manner. Ron Howard mentioned-
“A provider is simply a contract between an API and the Business Logic/Data Abstraction Layer. The provider is the implementation of the API separate from the API itself.”
Provider pattern is a way to get rid of the coupling among the components while making the components extensible. Main reason for our today's discussion on Provider Pattern is its wonderful ability to publish the API and at the same time make the API pluggable; that is-- it gives us the flexibility to choose the API that is best suited for the application rather than the one developed by API developer. And from an API developer perspective, it allows them to create an extension point for the API where clients of the framework can extend the functionality in their own way.
In this post, we investigate this design pattern, and show how we can utilize it to make components decoupled while providing extension points for configuration. To do so, we present the outline of today's discussion as follows-–(read more)