Microsoft Patterns & Practices Highlights and Roadmap

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Below you can find a summary of Patterns & Practices highlights:

What has been released?

Although claims-based identity has been possible for quite a while, there are now tools available that make it much easier for developers of Windows-based applications to implement it. These tools include the Windows Identity Foundation (WIF) and Microsoft Active Directory® Federation Services (ADFS) v2. This book shows you when and how to use these tools in the context of some commonly occurring scenarios.

This guidance focuses on four key areas – 1) using SharePoint capabilities to build more powerful applications; 2) building SharePoint applications that are easier to scale, maintain and grow; 3) improving application quality through testing and 4) improving and accelerating team productivity.

  • Nucleus Research report on p&p published - https://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/practices/ee406167.aspx
    • “productivity increase of 25 to 40% from using patterns & practices”
    • “it removes 30 to 40% of the work and lets us focus on very domain-specific work”
  • p&p developer center and library refresh – https://msdn.microsoft.com/practices
    • Developer Center aligned with MSDN visual refresh
    • p&p links on multiple other Developer Centers established and RSS syndication mechanism implemented
    • MSDN Library p&p product family created to enable publication and versioning of p&p API ref docs

What is coming next:

• Enterprise Library v5.0

Microsoft Enterprise Library is a collection of reusable software components (application blocks) designed to assist software developers with common enterprise development cross-cutting concerns (such as logging, validation, data access, exception handling, and many others). Application blocks are a type of guidance; they are provided as source code, test cases, and documentation that can be used "as is," extended, or modified by developers to use on complex, enterprise-level line-of-business development projects.

• Unity v2.0

The Unity Application Block (Unity) is a lightweight, extensible dependency injection container with support for instance and type interception.

• Acceptance Test Engineering Guide, Volume I: Thinking about Acceptance - RC released to CodePlex : https://testingguidance.codeplex.com/

Acceptance refers to the act of determining whether a software-intensive product meets the product owners’ expectations. This volume provides an overview of the acceptance process and how acceptance testing and other key practices fit into the process. It includes thinking models and perspectives on acceptance of key stakeholders.

• Web Client Developer Guidance project is in progress. This focuses on delivering guidance for building rich and responsive web applications, using ASP.NET Web Forms , MVC and AJAX.

• GAT/GAX for VS 2010

We have a project underway to refresh the GAT/GAX and the three software factory instances for Visual Studio 2010 by leveraging the new VS extensibility in VSIX. These will become available shortly after RTM of VS 2010.

• Application Architecture Guide Layer diagrams in VS 2010 Ultimate

The application architecture guide contains canonical layer diagrams for the various application types including web applications, rich client and service applications. We are working with Visual Studio product team to make these layer diagrams available as layer templates and can be used from the tool box to create new layer diagrams in VS Ultimate 2010.

• Patterns for Parallel Programming book

Based on the content built for PDC Pre conference workshop of the same title, this book will help software developers understand the fundamental challenges of parallel computing, that span from the client to the cluster, such as synchronization, shared state.

• Prism v4.0

Prism provides best practice guidance for building WPF and Silverlight client applications. Prism focuses on the patterns that support composite, extensible applications and test-driven development. Prism includes reusable code and components, comprehensive documentation, quick-starts, how-tos, and a sample reference implementation.