NETDUG Meeting and Software Patterns

I attended the NETDUG Meeting on Thurs. Sept. 20th. It is always a good meeting. I went to this one specifically to pick up my presentation materials for the MSDN event on Oct. 4th. In addition they had a INETA speaker there and I wanted to hear what he had to say about MVP patterns and ASP.NET.

The talk was titled Separation of Code and UI with MVP, by Scott Cate. Scott is a very dynamic speaker and I enjoyed some of the talk but once he really got into the discussion of Model Viewer Presenter I got bored and left to talk to the Microsoft reps. My problem with MVP is I learned it as MVC in my smalltalk days. Now most material on MVC/P is old hat. I agree with Scott however, you have to keep talking about it. Some developers never learned it.

I find myself going back to the tools more and more. Good tools support good practices and promote use of patterns. Poor tools do not. Fowler has always had some good discussion of patterns and some good documentation but it is hard to visualize software patterns until you get a good clean code example. This goes against what most pattern authors are trying to achieve since it brings implementation issues into what is purely a architecture discussion.

I believe in some case it makes it clearer. I will post a few patterns and their implementations that I have found helpful over the next few months.