Programming .NET Components, 2nd Edition

Designing and Factoring Interfaces

Syntax aside, how do you go about designing interfaces? How do you know which methods to allocate to which interface? How many members should each interface have? Answering these questions has little to do with .NET and a lot to do with abstract component-oriented analysis and design. An in-depth discussion of how to decompose a system into components and how to discover interface methods and properties is beyond the scope of this book. Nonetheless, this section offers a few pieces of advice to guide you in your interface-design effort.

Interface Factoring

An interface is a grouping of logically related methods and properties. What constitutes “logically related” is usually domain-specific. You can think of interfaces as different facets of the same entity. Once you have identified (after a requirements analysis) all the operations and properties the entity supports, you need to allocate them to interfaces. This is called interface factoring . When you factor an interface, always think in terms of reusable elements. In a component-oriented application, the basic unit of reuse is the interface. Would this particular interface factoring yield interfaces that other entities in the system can reuse? What facets of the entity can logically be factored out and used by other entities?

Suppose you wish to model a dog. The requirements are that the dog be able to bark and fetch and that it have a veterinary clinic registration number and a property for having ...