In our RIA consulting work, we often get requests to skin an application's components to fit the "look and feel" of a specific operating system (can you guess which one?) Yes, you guessed it, Windows XP.

The issue with this is that supporting a WinXP theme brings along with it WinXP OS expectations with regards to how the components should function. i.e., If it looks like WinXP, it better work like WinXP.

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In my post on the Ariaware RIA Platform (ARP), I mentioned that while working on the first release of Opal, we had implemented View Helpers as part of our pattern-based framework for that project. Although this seemed like a good idea at the time, as the application grew, I noticed that it was partly responsible for much of the code duplication we started to experience. This led, among other things, to us not incorporating View Helpers into Bits and Pixels' own, AS2-based framework, ARP. (ARP also differs markedly from the Opal framework in our implementation of the various patterns, including the event broadcasting and handling model as well as the behavior of the controller and commands.)

Working with Telrock Communications, we are currently refactoring the Opal framework to bring it in line with the best practices pattern implementations we developed for ARP. These include, among other things, removing the View Helper classes (and encapsulating View Helper methods as public methods within the various forms/screens themselves) and adding view references to broadcasted application events (to be used by the Command classes). But why are we undertaking such a large-scale (and thus risky) refactoring of the base code in the run up to a second release? The answer, as always in refactoring, is to remove duplication.

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