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In this article, let's learn about Design Pattern in .NET.

Table of Contents

1. Introduction
2. Gang of Four
3. Why use Design Pattern?
4. Design Pattern Types
5. Object Oriented Principles
6. Summary

Introduction

Design patterns are a critical part of software design. They are reusable solutions to common problems encountered in software design within a given context. In other words, they provide a template that you can use to solve typical issues you'll encounter during software development. The beauty of design patterns is that they help create flexible and easily maintainable applications. They are considered best practice approaches to common software development problems. However, it's important to remember that you should see these patterns as a starting point, not as a set of rules written in stone. Implementing a pattern can typically be done in multiple ways, depending on the language you're using and the problem you're trying to solve.

Gang of Four

One of the best-known design pattern categories is the Gang of Four (GoF) design patterns. This group comprises Erich Gamma, Richard Helm, Ralph Johnson, and John Vlissides. In 1994, they published a book called "Design Patterns: Elements of Reusable Object-Oriented Software", which has become the de facto standard work on software design patterns. The book consists of 23 patterns that are still commonly used today, even though they were written almost three decades ago. These patterns are still commonly used today and are often built into the framework we use.

While the book was written in 1994 and uses C++ 2.0, the patterns are still relevant today. However, the implementations have been adjusted to modern-day possibilities using current, real-life examples you might encounter in your day-to-day life as a developer. The three types of patterns defined by the Gang of Four will also be covered in the article. Instead of memorizing the exact implementation of each pattern, it's more important to understand which problem they solve and how they relate to the type of pattern.

Why Use Design Pattern?

Some of the problems that design patterns solve include,

• how to ensure that only a single instance of a class exists?
• how to make two objects with a different interface work together?
• how to extend an object interface without changing the underlying object?
• how to enable support for undo functionality? and many more

Design Pattern Types

There are three types of design patterns.

Creational patterns

These patterns help with creating objects in a flexible and independent way. They make it easier to add new objects to a system without tightly coupling them to the code. This means you won't need to use a lot of new statements in your code.

Structural patterns

These patterns define how objects and classes are related and connected. They help with creating larger structures in a system.

Behavioral patterns

They help with communication between objects and classes. These patterns can make it easier to understand how different parts of a system work together

Throughout the design pattern article series, you will also learn about two important principles of object-oriented programming.

Object Oriented Principles

The Gang of Four follow two important principles in their design patterns,

Program to an interface, not an implementation

Programmed to an interface means clients remain unaware of the specific types of objects they use as long as the objects adhere to the interface that clients expect. This allows for loose coupling.

Favor object composition over class inheritance

Object composition obtains new functionality by assembling objects, while class inheritance defines the implementation of one class in terms of another. The Gang of Four favored object composition over class inheritance as it leads to more reusable and simpler designs.

Patterns that adhere to these principles often follow the SOLID coding principles of open/closed and single responsibility. It's important to note that these patterns can be implemented in various ways, using abstract classes or interfaces.

Summary

In this article we learn't what is Design Pattern. A design pattern is a helpful solution to a common problem in software design. It's like a template that you can use to solve problems that you'll encounter while designing software. They help make software easy to maintain and flexible. The Gang of Four patterns are a set of 23 patterns that are commonly used today. They are grouped into three categories: Creational, Structural, and Behavioral patterns. Creational patterns help with creating objects, Structural patterns help with combining objects, and Behavioral patterns help with control flow. Two important principles to remember are to program to an interface and favor object composition over class inheritance. In the next article, we'll learn about the Singleton pattern, which is a common and easy pattern to understand.