Monday, March 19, 2007

Microsoft's Web Client Software Factory

A coworker brought up Microsoft's Web Client Software Factory bundle from MS Patterns and Practices as a possible foundation for rearchitecting our web apps.

I hadn't looked at it much before and while it does seem like a step up from our ad hoc solutions, it just doesn't seem to have the elegance of Castle.MonoRail and particularly Castle.Igloo. Moreover, ObjectBuilder does not seem as powerful as Castle.Windsor (which I've been using lots on new projects!)

The bonus for WCSF is that it's Microsoft code so it instantly acquires more legitimacy to some people. (The downside of course is also that it's Microsoft code...) Given that I know MonoRail doesn't have a snowball's chance of cracking into our tangled and legacy-encumbred Platform perhaps WCSF would be able to make a small measure of improvement. Our architecture already includes the concept of a PageHandler which is a pretty close fit for an MVP-ish Presenter. It also includes the concept of a (Page)Flow and does cookie-based persistence and state management via reflection. Formalizing these notions and setting them on a firmer foundation seems helpful overall. Given WCSF's service model, I'd also expect the code would become less coupled to the concrete implementation and therefore more testable.

Any opinions from the peanut gallery?

1 comment:

Brian said...

I know that David's been commenting on this recently. He comes more from the WCSF side of things. http://codebetter.com/blogs/david.hayden/default.aspx