patterns & practices Developer Center

Microsoft patterns & practices are Microsoft's recommendations for how to design, develop, deploy, and operate architecturally sound applications for the Microsoft application platform.

Microsoft patterns & practices contain deep technical guidance and tested source code based on real-world experience. The technical guidance is created, reviewed, and approved by Microsoft architects, product teams, consultants, product support engineers, and by Microsoft partners and customers. The result is a thoroughly engineered and tested set of recommendations that you can follow with confidence when building your applications.

Refer to the Microsoft patterns & practices Developer Center for additional Getting Started with patterns & practices information, including videos. You may also want to explore the different views of the catalog available from the Explore the patterns & practices Catalog page.

Guidance Types

There are four types of patterns & practices:

Guides

Guides consist of written guidance, either online or printed, which you can read to get a detailed understanding of technical problem domains and engineering practices. Microsoft patterns & practices Guides cover topics such as patterns, application architecture, integration, performance, and security.

Reference Implementations

Reference Implementations are executable sample applications that demonstrate patterns & practices guidance in action. You can use Reference Implementations to learn how other guidance deliverables are applied, or to copy code or concepts into your applications. Microsoft patterns & practices Reference Implementations cover topics such as application integration and interoperability using Web services.

Software Factories

Software Factories help architects and developers predictably and efficiently create high-quality instances of specific types of applications. Each software factory is designed to help build applications that share an architecture and a feature set. Examples of such application types include occasionally connected smart client applications, transactional Web service applications, and Web applications. A software factory contains a variety of software assets and software tools. Software assets include reusable code components, documentation, and reference implementations. Software tools include wizards, code generators, and visual designers. Typically, a software factory provides templates to help a development team quickly start development of new applications. It also continues to assist the developers by providing guidance and automation of the prescribed development activities throughout the application development life cycle.

Application Blocks

Application Blocks are reusable source-code components that provide proven solutions to common development challenges. They can be integrated as is into applications, or they can be extended or customized. Microsoft patterns & practices Application Blocks address specific recurring problem domains such as data access, logging, user interface process, and composite user interfaces. In most cases, you will want to read the guide that provides the architectural or patterns overview, and then explore the source code in the reference implementations and application blocks.

Using patterns & practices

Using patterns & practices you can:

The typical patterns & practices deliverable is focused on addressing a particular development scenario and consists of a combination of narrative guidance, that explains the architecture, design, and implementation, and thoroughly tested source code that instantiates the solution. The idea is that patterns & practices provides you with a proven starting point, from which to build your application that will reduce your project's risk and shorten your schedule.

You can use patterns & practices in different ways, from simply reading the guidance, cutting and pasting code examples and then modifying the code, to mining the guidance for patterns that are applicable to your scenarios without reusing any of the code. If you are an architect, you can explore patterns & practices to see what architectural approaches are in agreement with Microsoft's future technical direction. If you are a developer on a team that has already adopted a particular piece of guidance, you can study the content and the code in order to understand the context and design decisions that went into the guidance so you can take full advantage of it.

Relationship to Microsoft Products

Microsoft patterns & practices are not Microsoft products, but rather scenario specific applied engineering guidance that describes how to use Microsoft products in the context of developing and deploying applications, including source code. Often, patterns & practices detail how to incorporate multiple Microsoft products and technologies into the overall solution architecture.

Technical Strategy

Microsoft patterns & practices are approved by every Microsoft product group whose technology or product is involved in the scenario under consideration. The architectures, designs, and implementations described in patterns & practices are coordinated with current and future Microsoft technical strategy. The patterns & practices team makes every effort to ensure, but can not guarantee, future compatibility.

Support

Microsoft Product Support is trained on patterns & practices and provides the same level of support for using patterns & practices as they do for customer source code. In addition, the patterns & practices team works with product support and will assist them with escalations when necessary. If your organization has a Microsoft Premier Support Services contract, then you can obtain patterns & practices support under your existing services agreement.

Communities
Informal support is also provided in the online communities, both by patterns & practices team members, and also by other participating community members.

Community Participation

You can join a patterns & practices community to ask questions, provide feedback, and connect with other users to share ideas. Every patterns & practices release is available for review, in community, long before it is finalized and released. This community provides a feedback mechanism early in the engineering cycle and helps the patterns & practices team ensure that each deliverable meets the needs of its intended audience.

Communities
After patterns & practices titles are released, the communities continue to provide forums for discussion, support and the sharing of extensions.