Pablo’s Topic of the Month – April: Design Patterns

Over the next few days and weeks, the Los Techies crew will be writing a number of blog posts focused a particular subject in addition to their regular blogging.  Pablo’s Topic of the Month for the month of April is about ‘Design Patterns: Elements of Reusable Object-Oriented Software‘ (Addison-Wesley. ISBN 0-201-63361-2), the seminal book by the ‘Gang of Four’ (Erich Gamma; Richard Helm, Ralph Johnson, and John Vlissides) — heretofore known as ‘GoF’. There are quite a few patterns covered in this book and we definitely won’t get to all of them this month, but we’ll try to cover as many as we can, or at least go as deep as we can on some of the more (I daresay) important ones.

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What is a Design Pattern?

As always, Wikipedia has a pretty good start on the subject as well as another article on design patterns in general. I suggest you check that out first if you haven’t already read the book. For the feint-of-clicking out there, here’s a brief description via Wikipedia:

In software engineering, a design pattern is a general reusable solution to a commonly occurring problem in software design. A design pattern is not a finished design that can be transformed directly into code. It is a description or template for how to solve a problem that can be used in many different situations.

Most of the design patterns covered in the GoF book are applicable to .NET and worth being aware of, if not well studied. By recognizing already-solved problems when they being to arise, you can be a much more effective developer by using the solution pattern already devised and well refined by others to knock it out quickly so you can get back to solving the not already-solved problems.

Posts on Design Patterns

Since I’m just announcing this today, there are not any posts ready to go, but I will be posting them as they become available in this area. Please check back often!