Prequisites for Distributed Applications

When developing any more or less complex LOB application the developer needs some decent patterns, frameworks and tools to efficiently fullfill the given task. I assemled a list of elements which I personally recommend

• Base Framework: .NET 2.0 or 3.0
• O/R-Mapping: NHibernate and ActiveRecords
• IoC: Castle Windsor Container or MS ObjectBuilder
• Testing: NUnit, MbUnit, Rhino.Mocks
• Business Layer: CSLA
• Smart Client: CAB, SCSF

Tools

• VS 2005 Professional or Team Edition
• Resharper 2.5 or higher
• ActiveWriter Plugin for VS
• TestDriven Plugin for VS

Patterns

• Presentation Layer
  • MVC: Model View Controller, or
  • MVP: Model View Presenter

Processes/Design

• Domain Driven Design (DDD)
• Test Driven Development (TDD)
• Behaviour Driven Development (BDD)

All the items mentioned above need some further discussion and will be covered in more details below and in my future posts.

Acronyms

First let me define the acronyms used so far:

Acronym	Description
O/R-Mapping	Object-Relational Mapping. A technique used to bridge the gap between the relational database and the object oriented application
IoC	Inversion of Control: A technique used to instanciate, instrument and maintain objects during their life time. Especially helpful if one is developing loosely coupled applications
Unit Test	A test methodology used to test the state and behaviour of a single unit (e.g. object)
CSLA	Componentized Scalable Logical Architecture. Rockford Lhotka’s CSLA .NET framework is an application development framework that helps build a powerful, maintainable business logic layer for Windows, Web and Web Services applications
MVC	Model View Controller Pattern
MVP	Model View Presenter Pattern
DDD	Domain Driven Design
BDD	Behaviour Driven Design
TDD	Test Driven Developement
CAB	Componentized (User Interface) Application Block
SCSF	Smart Client Software Factory
LOB	Line of Business (Applications)

Links, Downloads

• The NHiberante Project
• The Castle Project for Active Records and Windsor Container
• The MS ObjectBuilder Dependency Injection Framework
• The CSLA .NET Project of Rockford Lhotka
• Testing with NUnit, MbUnit, Rhino.Mocks and the TestDriven AddIn for Visual Studio
• Refactoring and more with ReSharper
• ActiveWriter AddIn for Visual Studio
• Smart Client Developement with MS CAB and SCSF
• Test-Driven Development - TDD
• Domain-Driven Design - DDD
• Behaviour-Driven Development - BDD