OT: Patterns

  • Thread starter Thread starter Steve Barnett
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Steve Barnett

I'm probably showing my age as well as my ignorance by asking this, but
what's a "pattern"?

I'm beginning the move from VB6 to C# and I keep seeing people talking about
implementing this pattern or that pattern... is it what I would have called
an algorithm in the good old days or is it something more complex?

Sorry for such a fundamental question.

Steve
 
"Design Patterns" are solutions to commonly encountered design / development
issues - the following site is a good starting point as it gives somes good
examples, dotnet focused:

http://www.dofactory.com/Patterns/Patterns.aspx

Also, I believe this is the book that brought patterns to the masses:

Design Patterns: Elements of Reusable Object-Oriented Software
(Addison-Wesley Professional Computing Series) (Hardcover)
by Erich Gamma, Richard Helm, Ralph Johnson, John Vlissides


You'll probably also see "Anti-Patterns" mentioned. Put simply, these are
again "design patterns" that people have found to be useful for refactoring
software, either to fix bad design or to improve maintainability.
 
Pattern can be intrpreted as specific (well known) design of the part of the
system.

For example if someone tells you to use singleton pattern, you already know
that it means coding class that has static method/property that returns only
one and the same instance of the object for the whole app.

So, in this way patterns encapsulate knowledge, which may be helpful when
talking about design of the system.
 
Paul/Vadym,
Thanks for this. I was beginning to think it was something magical that
was going to significantly reduce the amount of work I had to do in the
redevelopment I now have in front of me (250,000 lines of VB6 code). While I
can see some advantages when reusing code, it also looks like a lot of work
if reuse isn't likely to happen in significant amounts (which it won't in
this case).

Much appreciate the info.
Steve
 
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