Practical Software Factories in .NET (Books for Professionals by Professionals) (Hardcover)

by Gunther Lenz (Author), Christoph Wienands (Author)
Key Phrases: solution feature model, factory schema, application core assets, Software Factories, Visual Studio, Windows Workflow Foundation (more...)

Editorial Reviews

Product Description
Practical Software Factories in .NET

The promise of Software Factories is to streamline and automate software development-and thus to produce higher-quality software more efficiently. The key idea is to promote systematic reuse at all levels and exploit economies of scope, which translates into concrete savings in planning, development, and maintenance efforts. However, the theory behind Software Factories can be overwhelming, because it spans many disciplines of software development. On top of that, Software Factories typically require significant investments into reusable assets.

This book was written in order to demystify the Software Factories paradigm by guiding you through a practical case study from the early conception phase of building a Software Factory to delivering a ready-made software product. The authors provide you with a hands-on example covering each of the four pillars of Software Factories: software product lines, architectural frameworks, model-driven development, and guidance in context.

While the ideas behind Software Factories are platform independent, the Microsoft .NET platform, together with recent technologies such as DSL Tools and the Smart Client Baseline Architecture Toolkit, makes an ideal foundation. A study shows the different facets and caveats and demonstrates how each of these technologies becomes part of a comprehensive factory. Software Factories are a top candidate for revolutionizing software development. This book will give you a great starting point to understanding the concepts behind it and ultimately applying this knowledge to your own software projects.

Contributions by Jack Greenfield, Wojtek Kozaczynski Foreword by Douglas C. Schmidt, Jack Greenfield, Jürgen Kazmeier and Eugenio Pace.

About the Author
Gunther Lenz

Gunther Lenz is a pioneer in the field of Software Factories. He received a master's degree (Dipl. Ing. Univ.) in electrical engineering from the Technical University of Munich, Germany. He spent five years working on research and product development of a high-performance medical image-processing system, under FDA regulation. In addition to his project experience, Gunther was also a core member of the Software Engineering Process Group (SEPG), which defined, implemented, and optimized the software development process. In 2002, Gunther joined Siemens Corporate Research in Princeton, New Jersey, where he is a program manager in the Software Engineering department. His current research activities focus on Model-driven Software Development (MDSD), model evolution, and Software Factories. Within Siemens Corporate Technology, Gunther leads the global research efforts in the areas Software Factories and Microsoft technologies.

Gunther is the author of the book .NET-A Complete Development Cycle (Addison Wesley, 2004) and has published many articles in different software development magazines, focusing on a variety of software engineering topics. Furthermore, Gunther has received the Microsoft Most Valuable Professional (MVP) Solution Architect award and is an invited member of the Microsoft Software Design Review Team. He frequently presents at international conferences on subjects related to his research area.

Christoph Wienands

Christoph Wienands received his Diplom-Informatiker (FH) in general computer science at the Furtwangen University of Applied Sciences, Germany. Before he joined Siemens Corporate Research as a software engineer in 2003, he worked as an independent consultant in Germany and as an IT systems analyst with SS White Burs, New Jersey. As part of his responsibilities in the Software Engineering department at SCR, Christoph gets to apply the latest Microsoft technologies, for example, in proof-of-concept applications and in consulting projects to other Siemens business units.

Together with Gunther, Christoph's current research activities focus on Software Factories, model-driven development, and domain-specific languages. In 2005, he became Microsoft Certified Solution Developer. Due to his research activities, he is a frequent speaker at conferences such as UML World, SD West, and others.

Product Details

• Hardcover: 240 pages
• Publisher: Apress; 1 edition (July 6, 2006)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 159059665X
• ISBN-13: 978-1590596654
• Product Dimensions: 9.3 x 6.9 x 0.9 inches
• Shipping Weight: 1.4 pounds (View shipping rates and policies)
• Average Customer Review: 3.3 out of 5 stars See all reviews (3 customer reviews)
• Amazon.com Sales Rank: #760,528 in Books (See Bestsellers in Books)

Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

2 of 2 people found the following review helpful:

1.0 out of 5 stars Not what I epected, July 6, 2008

By	David Taylor (Hamburg, NJ USA) - See all my reviews (REAL NAME)

Too much theory. No sample code. I quickly got bored with this book. One of the main reason I bought this book was to learn about MS GAT/GAX which the book only mentioned. I was also interested in learning some good practices on building Software Factories of which the author explained the basis and need but no supporting sample code.

1 of 2 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Software Factories in Practice, July 15, 2008

By	G. Lenz "geek^2" (East Coast) - See all my reviews (REAL NAME)

This book is not a user manual for DSLs or the GAT/GAX technologies. While it shows the basic technologies with small samples it is by far not comprehensive, but the book points to further resources to explore the technologies.
The book is rather meant to describe the process on how to implement a Software Factory in an exisiting product environment. We successfully used this approach for our product development and published the results http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/cc496679.aspx .
If you want to implement a Software Factory in your environment, read this book.....

2 of 6 people found the following review helpful:

4.0 out of 5 stars Anything that moves the factory space forward is a good thing, January 14, 2007

By	Damon Carr "Damon Wilder Carr" (Silicon Valley and New York) - See all my reviews (REAL NAME)

I was a bit dissapointed in this book, however I still highly recommend it to anyone interested (as I am with a book of my own on the way) in factories.

I was expecting far more in terms of real-world implementation, but I do understand all to well from experience that the pieces are not quite there yet. I suppose my dissapointment was in the name of the book. This is a far more theoretical 'what could be' book then 'here is how you do this now' book.

That being said, they do a good job of providing a nice single resource for defining many core concepts and adding (especially to a MSFT audience) many critical knowedge areas.

So bottom line, if you are even thinking about factories (and have already read the seminal work by Microsoft) then give this a read.

In my book I hope to be far more 'Practical' and able to show an 'A-Z' example from iterative Factory creation to iterative factory consumption and deployment.

Thanks,
Damon Wilder Carr, CEO
agilefactor