I am wondering if there is current interest in .Net Patterns Study Groups?
At work, our team is planning to meet regularly to talk about some of the newer .Net Patterns books and ideas:
Martin Fowler's Patterns of Enterprise Application Architecture
Christian Thilmany's .Net .NET Patterns: Architecture, Design, and Process (mentioned previously)
Sten Sundblad and Per Sundblad's Design Patterns for Scalable Microsoft .Net Applications
and books found on Microsoft's Patterns and Practices site:
Application Architecture for .NET: Designing Applications and Services
Enterprise Solution Patterns Using Microsoft .NET
Shortly after the GoF Book (Design Patterns), Patterns Study Groups cropped up everywhere. Now that .Net Patterns books have appeared, I haven't yet seen the same kind of interest. Maybe it's still too early. As far as online groups, I found a couple for .Net Patterns: dotnet-patterns (Yahoo group) (doesn't seem like much activity here for awhile) and patterns-hyd (Yahoo group) (a group that deals with .Net and J2EE patterns).
Even though the design patterns community had been around awhile (i.e. within the Smalltalk community), the GoF book was one of the first, and certainly the best, treatment of common software design patterns. The GoF book was difficult to understand though, and developers got together to try to figure out what these guys were saying. If nothing else, it helped solidify good architecture by building communities of developers talking about this stuff. In some places, these groups are still going strong.
Today, I am wondering if there is interest among developers (in particular, .Net developers) for .Net Patterns study groups as there was with the GoF book? What kind of group would this be? At some of the User Groups I attend, I see more “presentation†style going on rather than “discussionâ€, so I don't think that would be the ideal place. Granted, the interest may be limited mostly to the architecture wonks, but I would think many developers would benefit from groups like these.
