Do you think design patterns are academic nonsense, useless and elitist? If this is how you feel, the aim in this chapter is to show you the opposite, because nothing could be more wrong. Patterns can be very pragmatic, highly useful in day-to-day work, and extremely interesting to all (or at least most) developers....   Read Article.

The Adapter pattern lets you use an existing class to meet a client class?s needs. When a client specifies its requirements in an interface, you can usually create a new class that implements the interface and subclasses an existing class. This approach creates a class adapter that translates a client?s calls into calls to the existing class?s methods....   Read Article.

Brad Abrams describes the System namespace, which is the root of all namespaces in the .NET Framework, containing all other namespaces as subordinates. It also contains the types that are the most fundamental and frequently used....   Read Article.

Many developers view graphics programming as something best left to other developers, but the .NET Framework contains a vast array of tools to make graphics easier....   Read Article.

In some cases, John Mueller explains, configuration is the key to a successful .NET application installation, especially with the new security features Microsoft is implementing....   Read Article.

Linda Rising and Mary Lynn Manns show how recognizing and using organizational patterns (named strategies for recurring problems) can help one person to become an important agent of change for his organization....   Read Article.

Unsustainable development is an all-too common situation today in the software industry. Unsustainable development is a development pace that is typified by stress, frustration, and a sense of not being in control. It is most evidenced by a continually increasing cost of change and defect rate and a corresponding decreasing ability to respond to changing...   Read Article.

A writers' workshop brings together people in a way that enables effective criticism and suggestions for improvement Learn how the author has applied this age-old method to the improvement of software patterns....   Read Article.

An event pattern language is a computer language in which we can precisely describe patterns of events. The Rapide event pattern language is a declarative computer language for writing patterns of events. Learn more about the features and uses of Rapide-EPL....   Read Article.

Why should you learn about design patterns? How can they help you? Find the answers to these questions and more in this introduction to patterns and their benefits....   Read Article.

Create a bridge to a higher level of programming and find out how this design pattern can improve your implementation and abstractions by decoupling and letting them vary independently....   Read Article.

Much of the difficulty in building complex real-time and embedded system centers around managing shared resources in ways that are simultaneously efficient and robust. The patterns in this chapter focus on efficient management of memory as a resource and the robust sharing of general software resources (modeled as objects) to ensure schedulability of...   Read Article.

The Adapter pattern is used to convert the programming interface of one class into that of another, by writing a class that has the desired interface and then making it communicate with the class that has a different interface. James W. Cooper shows you two fairly easy ways to do this.nn...   Read Article.

Joshua Engel looks at design patterns from the standpoint of a maintenance programmer, and finds that they're actually more useful read than written....   Read Article.

The refactoring capability of Eclipse's Java development environment is one of the most useful features it provides. This article will introduce you to the steps for creating your own refactoring as a natural extension of Eclipse. Portions of the solution presented in this article were excerpted from the recently published book, The Java Developer's...   Read Article.

The development of applications using design patterns as design components requires a careful look at composition techniques. In this chapter we briefly review several techniques for composing design patterns....   Read Article.

For many, the obstacle to learning refactoring is in identifying the "smells" #151; the potential problem areas found in code. The smells in this chapter are similar. They're dead easy to detect. They're objective (once you decide on a way to count and a maximum acceptable score). They're odious. And, they're common.n...   Read Article.

Joins are the quintessential element in relational database systems. Knowing how and when to join can make or break database designs. And knowing how to find orphaned, missing, or extra rows can be crucial to accurate reporting....   Read Article.

Every C++ program -- and every networking app -- needs a good logging mechanism. ACE provides you with more than one way to handle such things. Consider your application and how you expect it to grow over time. Your choices range from the simple ACE_DEBUG macros to the highly flexible logging service....   Read Article.

Exception handling is more than just throwing and catching objects in .NET. There are many design elements in providing a robust system, and providing a sound exception handling, logging, and tracing schema are among the first steps. In this chapter from .NET Patterns: Architecture, Design, and Process, you'll learn best practices for determining...   Read Article.