In my ongoing campaign to promote my book, I'd now like to show the two pieces I'm most proud of, namely the forewords written by Martin Fowler and Eric Evans. Your expectations may be too great after having read them, because my writing doesn't come anywhere close to Martin and Eric's. Nevertheless, I'm still extremely proud of them. Here's the first one, by Martin Fowler:
Building enterprise software is rarely easy. Although we have a plethora of tools and frameworks to make it easier, we still have to figure out how to use these tools well. There are lots of approaches you can take, but the trick is knowing which one to use in specific situations - hardly ever does one approach work in all cases. Over the last few years there's grown up a community of people looking to capture approaches to design enterprise applications and document them in the form of patterns (I keep an overview with links at http://martinfowler.com/articles/enterprisePatterns.html). People involved in this effort, such as me, try to find common approaches and describe how to do them well and when they are applicable. The resulting work is pretty wide ranging, and that can lead to too much choice for the reader.
When I started writing Patterns of Enterprise Application Architecture (Addison-Wesley, 2002), I looked for this kind of design advice in the Microsoft world. I struggled to find much of anything, but one rare book that tackled the territory was Jimmy's earlier book. I liked his informal writing style and eagerness to dig into concepts that many others skimmed over. So it's fitting that Jimmy decided to take many of the ideas from me and the others in the enterprise patterns community and show how you can apply them in writing .NET applications.
The focus of this enterprise patterns community is documenting good designs, but another thread runs through us. We are also big fans of agile methods, embracing techniques such as Test Driven Development (TDD) and refactoring. So Jimmy also brought these ideas into this book. Many people think that pattern-people's focus on design and TDD's focus on evolution are at odds. The huge overlap between pattern-people and TDDers shows this isn't true, and Jimmy has weaved both of these threads into this book.
The result is a book about design in the .NET world, driven in an agile manner and infused with the products of the enterprise patterns community. It's a book that shows you how to begin applying such things as TDD, object-relational mapping, and domain-driven design to .NET projects. If you haven't yet come across these concepts, you'll find that this book is an introduction to techniques that many developers think are the key for future software development. If you are familiar with these ideas, the book will help you pass those ideas on to your colleagues.
Many people feel the Microsoft community has not been as good as others in propagating good design advice for enterprise applications. As the technology becomes more capable and sophisticated, it becomes more important to understand how to use it well. This book is a valuable step in advancing that understanding.
Martin Fowler http://martinfowler.com