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Are you an astronaut?

April 21st, 2009

An architecture astronauts that is?

As I said yesterday, I’m spending some time to studying design patterns. I’m ears deep in research on MVC which has led me to MVP and beyond. I’ve got some nasty code tightly bound to a WinForms UI. I want elegance and flexibility. What I have is neither.

So…

It is time to refactor. I’ve spent a lot of my day reading articles by Martin Fowler on UI development models over time. I still have more articles to read. Hopefully before the day is out, I’ll have some vague idea of how to get from where I am at to where I want to be. I get the concepts, but to paraphrase Fowler, “the implementation details of MVC can only be truly observed through a debugger, tracing through the code during execution.” It isn’t enough to read through the code and do a couple demo apps. It simply takes time and effort to truly grok the ideas. I’m spending the time and burning the mental CPU cycles to gain that understanding.

Back to an astronaut: An architecture astronaut is someone that spends ALL of their time thinking about the ideas of implementation and not actually doing the implementations. That is not what I strive to be… Here’s where I found the term. I want to develop a solid understanding of design patterns so that I can short circuit the design process and get to a working solution faster by standing on the shoulders of those that have come before me. It all sounds so nice. The implementation details may be a bit messier. (Understatement!)

Here are a few links:

  1. MVC vs. MVP: A Hillbilly’s Journey (Where I started and got rabbit holed on the pre-reqs)
  2. It Came From Planet Architecture
  3. Choosing a UI Pattern (MVC, MVP, and ASP.Net MVC)
  4. The Humble Dialog Box (PDF)
  5. Martin Fowler
  1. GUI Architectures
  2. Passive View
  3. Supervising Controller
  4. Presentation Model (light bulb starting to flicker on after reading this one, finally)

And now I’m back to the start with the Hillbilly article and some notion of where I want to go and how I may be able to get there.

Time to play with some code…

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