Description:
Suitable for any project manager or VB software professional willing to think outside the proverbial box, Software Development on a Leash presents some innovative ideas for building more flexible software based on patterns, and "best practices" for reusable component design illustrated in Visual Basic.This book's most salient feature is the authors' no-holds-barred attack on "traditional" ways of designing software. Instead, the approach advocated here is based on software patterns and self-modifying objects. (Instead of hard coding properties and methods as in mainstream object-oriented design, for example, this text shows how objects can modify themselves through metadata.) The result is undoubtedly more flexible objects, which can be better adapted to constantly shifting user requirements (the cost, judging from the VB code snippets provided here, is a very different programming syntax for most programmers). What keeps the discussion in check here is the book's reliance on software patterns, which recur throughout this text to enrich design concepts. Early sections look at how to create objects flexibly using Builder patterns. A chapter on collections (including iterators) shows off the author's own Visual Basic source code (all freely downloadable from the publisher's Web site). A fascinating later chapter looks at virtualizing database code. (This section more than justifies the cost of the book, and you might well productively adapt the suggestions given here, apart from the rest.) By aliasing table and field names, for example, the author shows how your team can sail smoothly despite quickly changing database requirements. Final sections glance at screen and report design, completing the circle of software that isn't at all hard-coded, but can change on the fly to meet new design requirements, even after deployment. Though probably not for every team, this text presents a good many innovative and worthwhile ideas for building more adaptable software. Even though you might not adopt its entire program, this title bears reading for any technical lead or advanced VB developer interested in software patterns and some leading-edge object-oriented design. --Richard Dragan
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