Simplifying patterns & practices

Software Factories 2010 Released

p[and]p Simplify — Tue, 25 May 2010 17:16:00 GMT

If you have used any of the software factories from patterns & practices and are interested in using them in Visual Studio 2010, this post is for you. Get the latest releases of the following projects:

Guidance Automation Extensions (GAX) 2010. Allows guidance packages to be run inside Visual Studio. Because the other factories are implemented as guidance packages, this is a required dependency. Download GAX 2010.
Guidance Automation Toolkit (GAT) 2010. You should install this if you intend to build your own guidance package, or want to build any of these factories from their source. Otherwise, you won't need it. Download GAT 2010.
Smart Client Software Factory (SCSF) 2010. Build smart client applications according to a pre-defined set of patterns and templates. Download SCSF 2010.
Web Client Software Factory (WCSF) 2010. Build Web applications according to a pre-defined set of patterns and templates. Download WCSF 2010.
Web Service Software Factory (WSSF) 2010. Build ASMX or WCF Web services using a modeling environment based on a domain specific language according to a pre-defined set of patterns and templates. Download WSSF 2010.

What's new?

Even though the goal of this work was to make sure you didn't have to wait any longer than necessary to use these in VS 2010, we were still able to fit in a number of nice changes. Many of the known bugs and work-arounds have been addressed. Here are a few of the changes that were made across all of these projects:

VSIX Deployment. All the new releases install and uninstall very quickly and cleanly. They also integrate with the new VS Extension Manager so you can manage them from inside Visual Studio. This also permits the 2010 versions to work side-by-side with the 2008 versions.
Enterprise Library 5.0. Each of the factories use EntLib and even though we didn't have time to leverage very many of the new EntLib features, we were able to update all of the references to 5.0 so you don't have to.
Documentation. All of the documentation, API references, QuickStarts, and Getting Started docs have been checked, updated, and tested. We also included topics on how to migrate your existing solutions to VS 2010.

Where to go for more?

patterns & practices on MSDN is a great place to start. Consider these pages home for these projects even though they also have resources on CodePlex and the Visual Studio Gallery.

If you have questions, or are interested in the source code or CHM documentation, each of these factories has a site on CodePlex.

Web Service Software Factory on CodePlex

Web Client Software Factory on CodePlex

Smart Client Software Factory on CodePlex

GAX Extensions Library on CodePlex

Discussions about GAT/GAX happen on the Guidance Automation Toolkit Forum on MSDN. If you're just not sure where to ask the question, please use the patterns & practices General Discussion Forum on MSDN. We're looking forward to hearing about your experiences.

Don, p&p team member

Factory Refresh Update

p[and]p Simplify — Wed, 17 Mar 2010 21:13:00 GMT

Context

The patterns & practices team is in the process of updating GAX, GAT, and 3 software factories (Smart Client, Web Client, and Web Service) to work with Visual Studio 2010. We intend to release all of these within 30 days of the VS 2010 launch. The main goal of this effort is to allow customers using Visual Studio 2008 to be able to move to VS 2010 and continue to use these VS extensions.

Broad Changes

All p&p releases are available on the MSDN Download Center and the same is true for this effort, but the binary releases of these extensions will also be published as a VSIX file to the Visual Studio Gallery. VSIX is a new, simplified deployment mechanism for VS extensions and we’re huge fans. The installation is much faster. As we have done in the past, source code releases each of the factories (not GAT or GAX) will also be provided on MSDN as a ZIP file.

Since Enterprise Library 5.0 is being built at the same time as this effort, we always intended to update any EntLib 3.0 dependencies to EntLib version 4.1. However, this week we are determining if we can use 5.0. Even if we can use 5.0, we know we won’t have time to take advantage of any new features. Also, any ObjectBuilder 1.0 references will not be updated. Stay tuned for updates on this.

We don’t intend to release the written documentation with the binary releases (it wouldn’t be very accessible even if we did), but they will be available online, and in a way you can sync them locally (for offline use) pretty easily. For the source code drops of the 3 factories, we will also include a CHM file of the documentation in the ZIP.

GAX 2010 and GAT 2010

Beyond the change to VSIX deployment and some bug fixes, you won’t see much difference with GAX. As I type this, there is a beta release of GAX in the VS Gallery and we’re waiting on the RC build to be signed so we can update it. This should happen within days of this post. We also removed the documentation for GAX since it didn’t add much value and the same content was included in the GAT documentation.

GAT is now capable of building guidance packages (GPs) that are VSIX deployable instead of having to use installer projects. It also has a new recipe for changing a Visual Studio 2008 GP to a Visual Studio 2010 GP. If you need to migrate a GP, we would be interested in your experience with these draft instructions. The release candidate build of GAT will be going out the same time as GAX (days from now).

Smart Client Software Factory 2010

Progress on the SCSF is going very well. We are currently in the process of building an RC drop to publish to the VS Gallery the week of March 22^nd. As we were reviewing the docs for the SCSF, we realized the ClickOnce technology has undergone so much change since these deployment topics were written we basically have to rewrite them. This effort has a lower priority than the factory itself, but we’re doing the best we can to have it updated by the release.

Web Client Software Factory 2010

Progress on the WCSF is also going very well. We have a version working on VS2010, and will be completing functional testing this week. We plan to publish a release candidate in early April. We did not add or remove any functionality.

Web Service Software Factory 2010

The Service Factory is the one we knew would need considerable changes. These changes are driven by new capabilities in Visual Studio that allow us to remove some of our code and simplify how we do certain things. Here is a brief description of some of those items:

The 2008 version uses the DSL Integration Service (DIS) to handle relationships between shapes on different models. VS 2010 includes the Model Bus to do the same thing in a cleaner, more robust way. This also made it very easy to enable composition and sharing of data contracts across data contract models—not possible (without modification) in the 2008 version.
The custom model project has been removed to simplify the code base and provide more flexibility. Now it uses a generic class library project. This makes it much easier to work with model files, but it does mean you have to make a language decision sooner.
We’ve replaced our components that generate the client proxy with the proxy generator built into Visual Studio. This simplifies the code base and the user experience, as well as provides more consistency between the client and the service.
The host model now has a look and feel that is more consistent with the user experience and metaphors used on the service contract and data contract models.
Because we are now using the latest DSL tools, we also get the benefit of their new features.

Miscellaneous

Release availability. All existing releases of these (code and documentation) will continue to be available on MSDN without change. These new releases will only be supported in VS 2010.

Side-by-side. We are not aware of any issues that prevent VS 2008 and the associated versions of these extensions from being installed on the same computer as VS 2010 and these new extensions.

* We understand some customers will be upgrading from the VS 2005 versions of the SCSF and WCSF. We expect these migrations won’t go as smoothly as the ones from VS 2008, but it should be possible. If this scenario describes you, we would like to hear from you.

Don, p&p team member

Prism, A Look Ahead

p[and]p Simplify — Mon, 15 Mar 2010 17:33:00 GMT

Since the initial release of Prism in June 2008, many developers have successfully used it to build flexible, modular applications for WPF or Silverlight (and sometimes both at the same time!). We updated Prism in October last year so that it could be used with WPF 3.5 SP1 and/or Silverlight versions 2.0 or 3.0. That update (available here) was Prism version 2.1.

The recent availability of the Visual Studio 2010, .NET 4.0 and Silverlight 4.0 Release Candidates has brought us one step to closer to the next generation of WPF and Silverlight platforms. We know that many developers are really looking forward to the powerful new features in WPF 4.0 and Silverlight 4.0. But, we also know that many developers want to continue to use Prism to build composite applications on top of these new platforms and are wondering about our plans for Prism. If you’re one of those folks, then this post will answer many of your questions.

Can I use Prism for WPF/Silverlight 4.0 development?

We’re just about to start work on the next version of Prism, which we’re calling version 4.0 (because 4 is the new 7 J). We’re targeting a release around September 2010 for Prism 4.0. In the meantime, we’ve had many folks ask us whether Prism 2.1 can be used for WPF 4.0 and Silverlight 4.0 development.

To answer that we’ve started to test Prism 2.1 against WPF 4.0 and Silverlight 4.0 (using the Release candidates for each). I’m happy to say that so far, apart from a couple of very minor issues in the Reference Implementation and some of the unit tests, we’ve found no issues with using Prism 2.1 for WPF 4.0 and Silverlight 4.0 development.

Of course, once .NET 4.0 and Silverlight 4.0 are released, we will complete our testing and we’ll release an interim update of Prism (probably called Prism 2.2) which will address any issues that we do find.

OK, so what about Prism 4.0?

The patterns & practices team exists to provide guidance for building well architected solutions on the Microsoft platform. Of course, that means that as the platform evolves, our guidance will evolve too. So while Prism 2.2 will be fully tested against WPF and Silverlight 4.0, it won’t add any new capabilities or target any of their new features. For Prism 4.0, however, we plan to take full advantage of the powerful new features in .NET 4.0 and Silverlight 4.0 and provide guidance on using them to build modular, flexible composite client applications.

There are more details on our current thinking for Prism 4.0 below but, as always, as we develop Prism 4.0 we’ll be following our Agile community-driven approach and actively seeking ongoing feedback. We’ll use this feedback to guide the specific details of the project. We’ll be dropping code and docs to our Prism CodePlex site every (two-week) iteration so that you can see exactly how Prism is evolving.

So what are some of the things that we’re thinking of focusing on in Prism 4.0?

We’ve been polling the community for a while now so we’re starting to get a good idea on the main things that folks would like to see in Prism 4.0. Our current thinking on four of these is described briefly below, but once we start digging into some of the details, and as we get feedback from the community in terms of relative priority & focus, our plans may change.

Managed Extensibility Framework (MEF) – Probably the most often-asked question that we get is "How to use Prism with MEF?" MEF, which is new in .NET 4.0 and Silverlight 4.0, simplifies the design of extensible applications and components. We in patterns and practices have long advocated the use of patterns and techniques for loosely-coupled component composition, so it’s extremely exciting to see it supported in the core .NET Framework itself! There are some really interesting possibilities for Prism, as described here. In particular, we’ll be looking at leveraging MEF for Component Composition (for hooking up Views and ViewModels, and other types of components), for Modularity (for the discovery, download, and instantiation of functionality packaged in a module), and for UI Composition (for mapping Views to Regions).

Although we’re looking to leverage MEF as part of the .NET 4.0 Framework, we will continue to support folks who wish to use a traditional DI containers such as Unity through IServiceLocator. We’ll provide guidance for those who just want to use MEF, and for those who just want to use Unity (or other DI container), for component composition. We’ll also likely cover hybrid scenarios with Unity and MEF working together. For Unity, we’ll be using Unity 2.0 which is part of the imminent Enterprise Library 5.0 release. We’ll also be updating the Reference Implementation to use Enterprise Library 5.0 too.
Model-View-ViewModel (MVVM) – The recent growth in popularity of the MVVM pattern is also something that we’re extremely excited about. We‘ve been encouraging the use of separated presentation patterns for many, many years and it’s fantastic to see the platform and tools finally start to support these patterns directly. Of course we’ve always provided guidance on MVVM (and other separated presentation patterns) in Prism, but there is much more we can do to make these patterns easier to apply.

So, for Prism 4.0, we’re looking to expand our current guidance and to include more re-usable code assets to support various MVVM scenarios. In particular, we’re looking to support common patterns for View/ViewModel interaction, hierarchical ViewModel composition, and ViewModel-based navigation. In addition, we’re also looking to provide more support for application-level structural patterns, layout management, the use of Ribbon/Popup/Dialog controls, and user state management.
Data Access & Application Services – There are powerful new data access technologies in .NET and Silverlight 4.0. WCF RIA Services, and WCF Data Services, are of particular interest to Prism application developers. There are various aspects that we could focus on here. In particular, we are looking to provide guidance on using these technologies in the context of MVVM, and on patterns for data validation and caching. This area also includes the use of other services for user preferences, authentication and authorization. This latter aspect brings in the possibility of providing guidance for role-driven (or claims-driven) applications and user experience.
Design-Time Support – We’ve also had many requests is for some level of design-time support for Prism. For Prism 4.0, we’re looking at providing a number of solution, project and item templates (similar to those posted here), as well as some code snippets, to make Prism easy to use within Visual Studio 2010. .NET 4.0 and Silverlight 4.0 now offer some level of binary compatibility (Yes!) so we’ll be updating our guidance on how to share code and components between WPF and Silverlight. This may also involve updates and improvements to the Project Linker tool that allows code to be linked between WPF and Silverlight projects. Another area we’re looking closely at is the use of Expression Blend. There are many cool features in Blend (in particular the Blend Behaviors Framework and SketchFlow) that we know developers would like to use during their Prism application development.

The areas outlined above represent a lot of work, so we very well may not be able to address them all in Prism 4.0 J We’re looking to you to help us to make some key decisions and to help us prioritize which aspects we should focus on first. If you’d like to get involved, make sure you visit our CodePlex site regularly. We’ll be posting updates there often.

Lastly, given the excitement at the release of the Windows Phone Developer Tools CTP at Mix 10 this week, some of you may be wondering about using Prism on Windows Phone 7 Series. We intend to support Windows Phone development in a future release of Prism. In the meantime we’ll be tracking the Windows Phone 7 Series development platform closely.

Hopefully this post has answered many (if not all) of your Prism questions. If not, please let us know!

The patterns & practices Client Team

A p&p Holiday Update, and How You Can Help Us Help You

p[and]p Simplify — Fri, 11 Dec 2009 19:03:00 GMT

As we wrap up the second half of 2009, we in the p&p team wanted to share with you an update on our deliverables; as well as what is our backlog for the first half of 2010.

One bit of housekeeping before I jump into the good stuff—a number of you have asked us to help you make it easier to adopt and use patterns & practices guidance inside your organizations, and in particular to help management understand the benefits. And so, we have been working with Nucleus Research, who also partner with Visual Studio Team System, among other teams inside Microsoft, to articulate the productivity benefits of using p&p guidance. Nucleus Research reached out to a number of you to put a report together. Specific highlights include:

"productivity increase of 25 to 40% from using patterns & practices"—customer quote

"it removes 30 to 40% of the work and lets us focus on very domain-specific work"—customer quote

Please let us know if this is useful, and if we can do more to help you in this context.

On to the fun stuff then.

Firstly, a couple of updates on deliverables shipped during the second half of 2009—in particular, the Microsoft BizTalk ESB Toolkit 2.0, and the Guidance for Developing SharePoint Applications, as well as the Silverlight 3 update for Prism and the Acceptance Test Engineering Guidance.

We shipped the BizTalk ESB Toolkit 2.0 in June of 2009. This product was formerly known as the ESB Guidance 2.0, and we has been renamed as part of the transition over to the BizTalk product team. The BizTalk team now owns future version and direction. For those that are not familiar with the ESB Toolkit, it is a collection of libraries and tools that extends the capabilities of BizTalk Server 2009 by supporting a loosely coupled and dynamic messaging architecture, and functioning as middleware that provides tools for mediation between services and their consumers. Enabling flexibility at run time, the BizTalk ESB Toolkit 2.0 simplifies loosely-coupled composition of service endpoints and management of service interactions. Dmitri Ossipov, the lead PM and architect of the ESB Toolkit gave a talk at PDC that is good introduction to the Toolkit and usage scenarios.

We delivered the Guidance for Developing SharePoint Applications v2.0 in August of 2009. This guidance focuses on four key areas:1) using SharePoint capabilities to build more powerful applications; 2) building SharePoint applications that are easier to scale, maintain, and grow; 3) improving application quality through testing; and 4) improving and accelerating team productivity. This work is the result of a close partnership with the SharePoint product team as well as Microsoft Consulting Services. Chris Keyser is the lead PM, and he, along with Francis Cheung continue to be the prime movers.

The release candidate for the Acceptance Test Engineering Guidance was released in October 2009. Acceptance refers to the act of determining whether a piece of software or system meets the product owners' expectations and this provides guidance for developers, testers, and architects on the discipline of acceptance testing. This guide is the first in the series of three dedicated to acceptance testing and requirements engineering—with upcoming deliverables focusing on acceptance test automation as well tool support acceptance test-driven development. Grigori’s blog is a good way to track this work and also to provide feedback and input.

We have also updated the Prism guidance for developing composite rich client applications to use Silverlight 3. We will be enhancing the Prism guidance in the first half of 2010, which I will get to shortly, to use Silverlight 4 and WPF 4, after the release of Visual Studio 2010. And yes, we did publish the Application Architecture Guide in book form—it is now available on your favorite online book store. You can also download the PDF version, please see JD’s blog as well as on MSDN.

Onto a few other areas that we are currently working with the community—specifically, the Claims-based Identity and Access Control Guide, Web Client Application Guidance, and of course Enterprise Library, as well emerging patterns on Parallel Computing.

The identity landscape has changed significantly with the introduction of the Windows Identity Framework (WIF), Active Directory Federation Services v2 (ADFS), and with .NET Services (AppFabric). Our goal for the Claims-based Identity and Access Control Guide is to help customers understand the concepts and show how to use these technologies for securing applications. This guide introduces claims-based identity, and is intended to make it easier for our customers to build features such as authentication, authorization, and personalization into applications in a more flexible way. Eugenio Pace is the lead PM and as you can see he loves to talk about clouds. J

We are well into the Web Client Application Guidance project. This effort addresses customer feedback and requests for proven practices to assist in the development of rich, responsive, modular Web applications. It is designed to help customers that need guidance navigating the Microsoft Web technology stack. We will be delivering guidance, a sample application and how-tos applying common patterns, as well as a reusable library. Blaine Wastell, our lead PM, is looking for feedback and more feedback—so, please, please do give us your input.

We delivered a workshop at PDC 2009 on the topic of Patterns of Parallel Programming. This was the result of a partnership with a number of product teams inside Microsoft. We are still early in terms of being able to publish proven practices. but this is an area where we are keen to do more, especially with the back drop of multi/many-core computing. We will keep you posted, but, as always, please let us know your feedback, your opinions, and your interest in partnering with us. Ade Miller, the p&p development manager is the prime mover behind this work and his blog is a good place to track progress.

Enterprise Library 5.0 is on track to ship shortly after Visual Studio 2010. Grigori Melnik, the lead PM for Enterprise Library, and Bob Brumfield give an excellent preview of what is on the anvil for Entlib 5.0 in this video from the patterns & practices Summit. We are really looking forward to this release, especially with the good work that team are doing with regards to simplifying the user experience for developers using Enterprise Library. By the way, Unity will continue to ship with Enterprise Library—and in fact recently Chris Tavares, the man behind Unity, wrote an article on DI in Libraries for MSDN Magazine.

I had hoped to share some more context as well as the backlog for the first half of 2010, but given the length of this post, I am going to give you a quick update on the patterns & practices Summits and defer to David Hill, the p&p lead architect, to post on the roadmap, both for the first half of 2010, and beyond.

patterns & practices Summit

We had the privilege of hosting the patterns & practices Summit 2009 in Redmond in October of this year. Many, many, thanks to those of you who traveled from across the US, the Americas, Europe, and Asia to participate and to share with the p&p community. Attendance was up by double digits over last year’s Summit—again thanks to you. And 97% of you who attended told us that you would recommend the patterns & practices Summit to your colleagues in the community. We are humbled by this and realize that we have a huge responsibility in upholding your trust as we plan upcoming Summits.

In addition to the global Summit in Redmond, we also had the opportunity to partner with our colleagues in Russia, the Ukraine, and China to host events for our customers in these countries. In September, Microsoft Russia hosted the patterns & practices Summit Russia in Moscow; and Microsoft Ukraine hosted the patterns & practices Roadshow in Kiev; and this month, partnering with Microsoft China, we are hosting the patterns & practices Summit China in Shenzhen. Thank you to those of you who were able to participate in these events. We hope that you enjoyed the content and that you had a good time meeting with the p&p team at these events.

We are also talking to our friends in Microsoft Israel, Microsoft India, and Microsoft Latin America, among others, and hope to share some good news about upcoming patterns & practices Summits in these regions shortly. Ajoy Krishnamoorthy continues to be our prime mover in helping us reach out and connect across the continents. In fact he, Don Smith and David are all in China right now for the patterns & practices Summit in China.

patterns & practices Developer Center on MSDN

Last, but definitely not the least, we (Steve Elston and team) have recently been working on an updated p&p Dev Center as part of the MSDN relaunch. We have been partnering with some of our friends elsewhere on MSDN (for example, C#, .NET Fx, SharePoint, Visual Basic, and BizTalk) to showcase some of our deliverables across those developer centers. In the coming months we will be adding cross linking to other developer centers, including ASP.NET, Silverlight, Windows Azure, and so on. We hope that the new, and greatly simplified, user experience is to your liking. As always we look to your feedback, please feel free to send me e-mail at johnd@microsoft.com.

Happy Holidays from all of us at p&p!

patterns & practices, a Primer at InformIT

p[and]p Simplify — Wed, 09 Dec 2009 23:33:00 GMT

Recently, as part of the 15^th anniversary of the GoF book, I met with Larry O’Brien of InformIT to talk about the mission of patterns & practices at Microsoft; about our customers, and the specific areas that we focus on to help them be even more successful in their application development; and some of the specific productivity increases that many of our customers are able to achieve by using patterns & practices.

In particular, we discussed how patterns & practices applies team agile software development techniques, with a combination of Scrum-style management along with XP development practices. We also spent time talking about how we strive to engage with the community, and last but not the least, some of the key recent deliverables from the team.

If you are not very familiar with the what or the how of patterns & practices at Microsoft, I would recommend this as a good primer.

Many thanks to Larry O’Brien for taking the time to meet with me, and for his questions.

John, product unit manager
johnd@microsoft.com

Factories on Visual Studio 2010: An Update

p[and]p Simplify — Thu, 05 Nov 2009 19:07:50 GMT

Back in February, I blogged about our plans to update GAT/GAX and the Smart Client, Web Client, and Web Service Software Factories (hereafter referred to as the “goods”) to Visual Studio 2010 within 30 days of its release. Now that beta 2 is available, you probably aren’t surprised to hear I’ve been getting an increasing number of e-mails lately asking how things are going. I thought it would be easier to just point everyone to the same answer…

The project is on track and going well. Right now we’re in the process of determining the complexity of the changes we’ll have to make and things are looking good… better than we expected. The patterns & practices team is working closely with some of our long-time partners Clarius Consulting, Southworks, and DigitFactory so we’re pretty sure this migration will be smooth and fun. Since everything else is dependent on GAX, getting it to a stable state on VS2010 is the first order of business. We hope to have early drops by the end of the calendar year so we can all start bringing forward the multitude of goods. I’m not yet sure where we’re going to post these drops of GAX, but stay tuned here and I’ll let you know when we figure it out. The early drops of the factories will be on their respective CodePlex sites.

The plan for this to be a direct port (no new features) still holds true, but we are going to attempt one substantial improvement. VSIX is a new feature in VS2010 that allows developers to deploy/install VS extensions right from within VS. Check out the Visual Studio Gallery and the Extension Manager. This is a significantly more simplistic and supported approach to deploying extensions. Coincidentally, the part of GAX responsible for most of its complexity, and has caused us (and many of you) the most headaches, is deployment. So we hope to remove a lot of code, reduce some complexity and still be able to post all of the goods to the VS Gallery. The main constraint we’re working against is time and budget. I’ll let you know (probably in the notes below) as soon as we’ve made a decision. I’d also be interested in your thoughts.

Another benefit to using VSIX is we think it will make the side-by-side scenario with VS2008 and the current version of GAX much easier to enable. Speaking of side-by-side ...

It’s important you understand that we have no plans to support existing software factories/guidance packages “as is” on the new version of GAX and VS2010. We expect the goods will have to be modified and recompiled to be brought forward. With that said, one of our highest priority goals is to minimize the amount of changes that will have to be made. We’ll drop early docs on the migration process too. The existing version of the goods will remain in its current state on MSDN, untouched, even after the release of VS2010. As long as the new version of the goods can run side-by-side with their current versions, we don’t expect any problems for customers. Please let me know if this isn’t true.

Don, p&p team member

Welcome to Simplifying patterns & practices!

p[and]p Simplify — Sat, 09 May 2009 00:42:00 GMT

...the team blog of the patterns & practices team. For those of you who aren’t familiar with the patterns & practices team, let’s start with a brief introduction.

We are a small team in Developer Division (fondly known as DevDiv) and our mission is to provide guidance to developers & solution architects who are building applications on the Microsoft application platform. By providing guidance, we hope to make you more successful by speeding up your development, by reducing technical risk, and by helping you navigate the often confusing landscape that is the Microsoft application platform.

You’ve probably guessed from the first half our name that we’re rather enthusiastic about design patterns. Design patterns describe solutions to common issues that occur in application design and development. A large part of what we do involves identifying these common issues and figuring out solutions to them that can be used across different applications or scenarios. Once we have the patterns, we typically package them up in what we call an application block.

An application block is a package of re-usable code, samples and extensive documentation that you can take and use to help you build your application. In some cases, the application block might include some form of scaffolding integrated into Visual Studio. We have application blocks to help you build Web, rich client, RIA, mobile, and Web service applications. We also have application blocks to help you with those pesky cross-cutting concerns—things like exception handling, data caching, etc.—that you need in pretty much every type of application. We’re working on application blocks for the Cloud, data access, and for SharePoint development. As well as application blocks, we have guides for testing, performance, security, and for general architecture and design on the Microsoft application platform.

As you can see we cover quite a bit of ground for a small team, which makes our life pretty exciting at times (and not always in a good way). To help us cope, we’ve adopted an agile approach to the development of our guidance. We do the whole agile thing, including test-driven-development, scrums, team rooms, pair programming, iterations, backlogs, etc. We always work with an advisory council of customers and interested individuals in the developer community who help to keep us honest and make sure we solve the highest priority problems first. During the project, at the end of each iteration we release everything to CodePlex. This allows is to get as much feedback as possible. With final releases published on MSDN. A typical project runs anywhere between 3 and 9 months. We also provide some guidance on agile development (hence the practices bit of our name).

So that, in a nutshell, is the patterns & practices team. And this is our team blog. I bet you’re wondering why we have team blog and why it’s called "simplifying patterns & practices."

It’s true that pretty much everyone on the team blogs, tweets, Facebook’s, LinkedIn’s (should that be Links-In?), Channel 9’s, Dot Net Rocks and MSDN Magazine’s their work in patterns & practices. With so many communication channels and so many diverse projects and technologies it’s sometimes difficult to believe that we do, in fact, have a common mission and a plan! This blog is intended to help bring all of these threads together in one place. In the coming months we’ll have posts from many members of the team and they’ll describe their work and how it fits into our overall mission. We’ll also have posts from guest bloggers who are external to the team.

So why "simplifying patterns & practices." There are two answers to that.

Firstly, the guidance that we provide is meant to simplify your development life and leave you more time for blogging/twittering/surfing/watching Channel9/Action<T>’ing.

Secondly it’s fair to say that some of our guidance has been on the, errrm, complicated side. We do focus on building real-world applications on a solid architectural footing, so some complexity is inevitable but still, we think there is a lot we can do simplify our guidance and improve the way in which we build, package and deliver it. We’re hoping to use this blog to document our journey and we hope that you will join us along the way and give us your full and frank feedback!

David Hill, Architect
May 2009