Posted by: Steven Smith, on 13 Jul 2011 | View original | Bookmarked: 0 time(s)

Last night I gave a presentation at the Cleveland .NET SIG on Common Design Patterns.  The turnout was great, so much so that the group ran out of pizza and chairs, so thanks to everyone for taking the time to come out!  Thankfully the A/C held up pretty well (in years past, its been an issue there), and I hope everybody enjoyed the topic and discussion.  I promised that I would post the slides and demos here, so I am, along with a few links to other resources.

• Download my Common Design Patterns slides and sample code.  You can also view my sample code directly on CodePlex as its checked into its own fork of the MVC Music Store there.
• Learn more about Design Patterns using PluralSights Patterns Library (to which Ive contributed a few patterns)
• Learn more about OOP principles like Single Responsibility, Open/Closed, DRY, etc. from my PluralSight Principles of OO Design course
• I link to a few good patterns books in my slides, but heres a quick summary:
• Design Patterns (the reference)
• Design Patterns Explained
• Design Patterns in C#
• Head First Design Patterns (my review here)
• Domain Driven Design includes the Repository pattern, among others
• Applying Domain-Driven Design and Patterns shows how to put everything together
• If youre interested in anti-patterns, as well as patterns, you should read Principles, Patterns, and Practices of Mediocre Programming
• I discuss the Four Stages of Learning Design Patterns here
• You can learn more about the CachedRepository pattern (using Proxy + Repository) in this post
• I mentioned that Ive done a few dnrTV episodes lately on design patterns as well:
• Commonly Used Design Patterns (Part One) Mostly the same material as the talk in Cleveland last night.
• Design Patterns in .NET (Part Two) Demonstrates some more hands-on demos and refactorings, walking through applying some of the patterns covered in Part 1
• Design Patterns in .NET (Part Three) Shows an evolving design that eventually benefits from the State and Null Object patterns

My dnrTV talk where I show how to implement the Null Object pattern, that I mentioned last night, went live yesterday and is linked above (Part Three).  If you saw my quick demo of Null Objects and want to learn more about how and when to use them, check out that show.  For a more detailed explanation of these and other patterns, if you prefer screencasts and code to books, I highly recommend the Pluralsight Design Pattern Library.  Theres a bunch of good stuff in there and Ive learned a lot about how to implement many of these patterns by watching others videos on PluralSight.

Toward the end of my talk last night, one of the attendees asked (paraphrasing) Is it ever the case that patterns are used too much, resulting in too much abstraction and complexity?  Yes!  In fact, thats a stage I think virtually everybody goes through as they move through the stages of learning design patterns.  The best way to apply patterns is via refactoring, once you feel some pain and you recognize that this particular pain can be alleviated by a design pattern.  Be very careful, unless youre very experienced with the pattern in question, about building systems from scratch that rely on many design patterns before you have gained knowledge actually building the system (that is, beware Big Design Up Front and prefer YAGNI).

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