Do you use design patterns?

Question

What\'s the penetration of design patterns in the real world? Do you use them in your day to day job - discussing how and where to apply them with your coworkers - or do the

Answer 1

Yes. Design patterns can be wonderful when used appropriately. As you mentioned, I am now using Model-View-Controller (MVC) for all of my web projects. It is a very common pattern in the web space which makes server-side code much cleaner and well-organized.

Beyond that, here are some other patterns that may be useful:

• MVVM (Model-View-ViewModel): a similar pattern to MVC; used for WPF and Silverlight applications.

• Composition: Great for when you need to use a hierarchy of objects.

• Singleton: More elegant than using globals for storing items that truly need a single instance. As you mentioned, a simple pattern but it does have its uses.

It is worth noting a design pattern can also highlight a lack of language features and/or deficiencies in a language. For example, iterators are now built in as part of newer languages.

In general design patterns are quite useful but you should not use them everywhere; just where they are a good fit for your needs.