Reading Source, Minima I

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I'm interested in the notion of deliberate practice as it relates to software developers.  How do we "practice" effectively?  One of the things I've been wanting to be more serious and deliberate about was reading source code.  Hanselman has inspired me with his "weekly source code" posts and since good ideas are worth copying I'll start to document some of the projects I download and look into for examples of good code.

The project I'm currently working on involves a lot of WCF. I've got mixed feelings (as well as a lot to learn) about it so I thought I'd start off by running Minima, Dave Betz's WCF/.NET 3.5 blog engine as a sample of an end-to-end application I can model my own WCF architectures after. 

Minima was not easy to get going. While I'm perhaps not the brightest kid on the block, the biggest item I struggled with would probably be a challenge to anyone: the certificates used in the WCF security model. While Betz has a blog entry documenting the basic usage of certificates with WCF, it is predicated on the WCF host not being IIS. For the blog I assumed everything should be deployed to IIS and ran into the a lesser known fact that one must use the Windows HTTP Services Certification Configuration Tool to enable the ASPNET account access to the certificates for their usage. There were also a couple of post build events in the project that I removed after getting my references set up.

But before I get into particulars, I wanted to go over the broader structure of the project.  The Minima solution has the following projects:
* Minima.Service
This has the service and data contracts with no implementation
* Minima.ServiceImpl
This has the implementation of the service
* Minima.Configuration
A configuration helper which makes use of a library called Themelia (Betz is, apparently, a Biblical Greek scholar on the side)
* Minima.Web
Library for the blog website's features
* Website
A website project
* Website Service project (exposes services for posting content to the database via WCF)

I'll write about more particulars in my next post but for this overview my biggest takeaway in the project structure is decoupling.  Separating the service from the service implementation, separating the website from it's functionality by a project with the only purpose of implementing that backend logic, and separating general purpose frameworks like Themelia (for reading the config file etc).

When I start my own projects I usually think too much about doing a proof of concept and less about decoupling the overall structure. As a result most projects start off as a "sketch" in a single Visual Studio project and by the first release end up staying that way on a permanent basis. But perhaps what we should focus on as programmers is less the cleverest algorithms and more the most elegant structure for building solid applications.

Next stop: WCF and Generics.

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