In Issue #102 of SD times, there's an insert devoted entirely to “Leveraging .NET Components.” Now, mostly this is a “Special Advertising Section” kind of thing, but there's a good article by Larry O' Brien called “The Face of Interface” that talks about reuse of UI components.
This is something I think about a lot, UI reuse. Lets' face it. For the most part, we developers suck at making UI. For example, have you ever noticed that most developers can't seem to figure out how to turn table borders off, when using tables to format a form? Anyhow, this is a big tall soapbox for me that I don't have the energy to get up on right now, but I do think that UI Inheritance and reuse are going to be our saviors in this area.
Anyhow, there are some good nuggets in this article, like this one here:
“a class with many public elements can be difficult to keep in a stable state.“
Now, lately I've been doing a bunch of framework refactoring, and I wish this idea had been put in my head a year ago..
But my favorite quote from the article is a caption for a figure, which says, simply :
“Captiopm is herk”
Now, maybe they rushed out this issue, which mags like this one are prone to do, and this is an error. Or maybe Captiopm really is herk. I'll never know, but I'm going to keep both of these nuggets in mind the next time I go do do some framework architechiture work.
-Brendan