Best practice DDD/TDD ASP.NET MVC example applications
It’s no secret that I’m a big fan of the ASP.NET MVC Framework. One of the reasons I like it is because it’s opinionated – instead of leaving developers free to fumble things as they choose, it recognises that most projects will be more-or-less exactly the same, and imposes some conventions to keep everyone on the same path.
This is the same philosophy used by many other application frameworks, and it saves everyone time and confusion by providing well-thought-out standards that everyone’s familiar with. However, because ASP.NET MVC is a general purpose web framework, its conventions can only cover so much — guidance for other frameworks and patterns is left to the community.
One very important area (that inspired this article) is around object-relational mappers (ORM). If I’m using the ASP.NET MVC framework:
- How do I reference a repository from controller?
- What’s the best way of applying a per-http-request unit of work pattern?
- What should it look like if I’m using NHibernate? LINQ-to-SQL? etc.
Thankfully, there are a few example applications available that demonstrate solutions to these questions (and many more):
| Kym | NHibernate, Rhino-Commons, Castle Windsor, NUnit, Rhino Mocks, jQuery, Json.NET |
| S#arp Architecture | NHibernate, Ninject, MvcContrib, NUnit, Rhino Mocks, Json.NET |
| CarTrackr | Linq to SQL, Unity, MSTest, Moq, Visifire Silverlight charts, OpenID |
| MVC Storefront | LINQ to SQL, StructureMap, MSTest, Moq, NLog, CardSpace, Windows Workflow, OpenID |
| Suteki Shop | LINQ to SQL, Castle Windsor, NUnit, Moq, log4net, jQuery |
It’s really good to see some different opinions in implementation and design, across a range of frameworks. MVC Storefront is of particular note – everything is explained over a series of 20-or-so podcasts that include interviews with well-known .NET developers like Jeff Atwood (Coding Horror/StackOverflow), and Ayende (NHibernate).