Effective Use of Microsoft Enterprise Library: Building Blocks for Creating Enterprise Applications and Services

A. The Data Mapping Application Block

THE END OF Chapter 3 began to discuss how it is a generally accepted best practice that database providers are called from data access logic components. The Microsoft patterns & practices team lists several goals to strive toward when designing data access logic components in a distributed application.¹ One of the recommended best practices is for the design to expose expected functionality that is common across all data access logic components in a separately defined interface or base class. This is the fundamental principal for the Data Mapping Application Block and more specifically for its abstract DataMapper base class. Martin Fowler defines a Data Mapper as:

...a layer of software that separates the ...