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Managed code anyone?

The dynamics of application development in enterprises can quickly become chaotic if no management plan is in place. Taking the time to establish the principles of a managed code system will reap efficiency benefits later.
Written by Greg Griffiths, Contributor
One of my clients decided to reorganize their portfolio of applications to reduce the duplication and complexity in their systems.

As part of this process they decided to try to deliver the majority of their system via a Web front end to their internal user community, who were all using Internet Explorer 5.5+ as their Web browser.
A range of components
As with any set of developments in a common area, we quickly came across a variety of functions which were reused from project to project. These components encompassed a range of technologies including .Net, JavaScript, CSS, Classic ASP, and XML. The items themselves were equally wide ranging, for example DHTML menu controls, regular expression validator functions, common CSS classes, and a classic ASP XML reader which used .Net's Web.Config file alongside the .Net components included in the system.
Over time, these functions, components and scripts were packaged up into a set of common items, with names such as common.js or common.css, and moved from project to project, system to system. As the reuse increased, some instances of the functions were enhanced, bugs were fixed etc, and we were faced with the problem of pushing this change out to all copies of the specific function within our complex infrastructure.
At this point, the development architecture team began to look at the best way of leveraging and managing the use and growth of these items within the organization. After much discussion, we were able to divide the code into four distinct groupings:
1. Corporate
2. Application Global
3. Component / Subsystem Global
4. Page specific

Items in the first case were functions, CSS Classes, images and the like that were used on the majority of Web based applications. This included the CSS and images that were used for our common corporate look and feel as well as an ASP.Net menu system and some JavaScript functions such as isInteger and addOptionToDropdown. Items in the second set were primarily specific to a given Application within our portfolio such as a function that validates bar codes for our data entry system or an application specific logo.


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The third set were items that were part of either a component such as a DataGrid or part of a subsystem that were not required to be available to the rest of the application, such as a login control or a stored procedure to create users in a given system. The final set were items that were implemented on an almost once off page level such as specific CSS styles or validatory JavaScript.
Now that we had identified the four groupings that we wanted to segregate our code into, we began looking through the code were working on to align the functions, classes etc. with this new structure. A new set of prefixes were added to our coding standards to identify to which group each element belonged to. Slowly, each application began to include a corporate package and an application package in addition to their own specific functionality. By "package," I mean an external JavaScript and CSS file as well as new sections in the Web.Config files for .Net applications and their equivalents in other languages such as classic ASP or J2EE.
It was decided that all corporate elements should reside on a single central server to ease management. To support ease of management across all systems, the directory structure shown in Figure A was introduced for the first two groups.

Figure A

Directory Structure


While the content of the CSS and JavaScript directories should be obvious, the other entries require a little more explanation. The Config directory contained configuration files that were needed by the code in that group. These included .Net's Web.Config files and classic ASP's .INC type, as well as the traditional .INI file types. The Scripts directory contained any interpreted scripts present at that level such as classic ASP, PHP or Perl as well as other files such as batch files. The final folder—Bin—contained compiled code such as ASP.Net applications, ActiveX DLL's and Java Servlets. Within each folder, further sub folders allowed greater management of the individual elements.

Additional white paper resources
  • Patterns & Practices Live: Writing Optimized Managed Code
  • An Overview of Managed/Unmanaged Code Interoperability
  • Writing Managed Code in Visual Studio.NET

    For each folder in each tier a custodian was appointed to be responsible for the management of the items in the specific folder. This role included being the key contact for the items as well as being the lead contact when they were updated whether it was for a bug fix, routine update or functionality enhancement. They are also responsible for ensuring that adequate documentation existed both within the code and separately and for the management of those items—for example backup and storage in a source code control system.
    This level of enhanced symbiosis of the code between systems forced a greater level of documentation and quality control upon the developers and the custodians of the content of each tier to ensure that any work done on an existing function—such as adding a parameter—or any new functionality added, did not cause major problems for other systems that also used the same function.
    On the JavaScript and CSS front, this made the management of the organization-wide code base easier as functions could be moved from one tier to another with minimum effort as the situations required them. The move would require a cursory test of the affected systems to ensure that there was no impact. Therefore, a JavaScript function that began life at the application level could easily be moved to the corporate level once it had been reused repeatedly simply by copying and pasting the file.
    Reducing lines of code
    With this rationing of the way the development team worked—the segregation of individual code elements, CSS Class, images etc., and the use of custodians—we have been able to significantly reduce the number of lines of code that are written for each application. Also, the increased use of packaged functionality means that less time is required for testing, QA and documentation as the functionality has already been proven to work.
    This efficiency saving has been reflected in the work estimates that we have been able to give to our end users. In this case, a fair amount of effort up front has resulted in major cost, resource, and time saving for the organization and the rewards are being reaped by subsequent projects.
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