Design is Philosophy

You might remember my post on “Code is Poetry”. Well, once again I’m in the plane after another most amazing days. I’m flying home from a 2-days meeting, purely dedicated on Design Patterns for Microsoft Dynamics NAV. If you are a developer, and don’t know what I’m talking about .. then let me take the opportunity (to not say: let me dig out your head from the ground…) to briefly take you through the outcome until now.. .

In short…

As you can read in my previous post, there are some people that are trying to put into words what design patterns you can find in NAV.

First question: what are “design patterns” .. even more .. can we speak of design patterns, when we don’t have a purely object oriënted development environment? Well, sure we can! And we are!

When you think of “what design patterns are” .. I would like to quote Christopher Alexander:”Each pattern describes a problem which occurs over and over again in our environment, and then describes the core of the solution to that problem, in such a way that you can use this solution a million times over, without ever doing it the same way twice“.

And people have been busy .. here you can find what the team has been writing:

• Silent File Upload and Download
• Copy Document
• Blocked Entity
• Multilanguage Application Data
• Single-Record (Setup) Table
• Standard Journal
• No. Series

As you can see .. you can find most (all..) of them on the NAV Team Blog. So keep that in your RSS or whatever you use ;-).

What did we do?

Well, simple: brainstorming on everything we need to do, to do what we’re doing .. to provide the community with patterns and feedback on how to use them .. IF you should use them .. commenting on whether they’re useful, .. all that. Wouldn’t it be nice that you can tell your developers: “I want you to create an EDI functionality, and I want you to do it with the Facade Pattern” .. and everyone immediately knows what you’re talking about? That the right expectations were set? That everyone can read what was written, and maintain what was written?

During the 2 days, we also spent time in writing each a pattern on our own .. and I must say, that was more productive then I would have expected. In one go, we had drafts for about 8 new patterns. So expect quite some new patterns in the near future.

Next meeting will be in Belgium just before the next NAVTechDays. I can’t wait to meet Bogdana Botez, Mark Brummel, Gary Winter, Anders Larsen, Bardur Knudsen, Elly Nkya, Abhishek Ghosh, … (I’m probably forgetting people..) again!

Stay tuned!