Ben Shoemate's Notebook

Not too long ago, I posted The Enterprise Dependency. Essentially, it was a visual depiction of a good ole' enterprise framework that was "several dozen megabytes chock full of helper classes like IEnterpriseAuthenticationProviderFactoryManagementFactory." Inspired by the diagram, commenter "LieutenantFrost" shared his own "enterprise-ness and despair" with a dependency diagram that looks somewhat like an anglerfish.

But that got me thinking: like a Representative Line, perhaps dependency diagrams can help provide some insight into the pain that large applications' maintainers face each day. And just then, Jan-Hendrik sent in such a diagram. Note that each little box represents a class, and a line is its dependency to another class.

Jan added, "as people were introducing me to the code, they repeatedly said that parts of the system were so complex that no one dared touch it. My code dependency analyzer (X-Ray) generated this this beautiful spidery ball of fun."

If you have a dependency diagram of your own that would be a good fit for Enterprise Dependency, please send it to me!

Not too long ago, I posted The Enterprise Dependency. Essentially, it was a visual depiction of a good ole' enterprise framework that was "several dozen megabytes chock full of helper classes like IEnterpriseAuthenticationProviderFactoryManagementFactory." Inspired by the diagram, commenter "LieutenantFrost" shared his own "enterprise-ness and despair" with a dependency diagram that looks somewhat like an anglerfish.

But that got me thinking: like a Representative Line, perhaps dependency diagrams can help provide some insight into the pain that large applications' maintainers face each day. And just then, Jan-Hendrik sent in such a diagram. Note that each little box represents a class, and a line is its dependency to another class.

Jan added, "as people were introducing me to the code, they repeatedly said that parts of the system were so complex that no one dared touch it. My code dependency analyzer (X-Ray) generated this this beautiful spidery ball of fun."

If you have a dependency diagram of your own that would be a good fit for Enterprise Dependency, please send it to me!

Like all good enterprisey development organizations, Jerod’s has an Enterprise Architecture Group that’s responsible for maintaining the Enterprise Framework. And like all good enterprise frameworks, Jerod’s is several dozen megabytes chock full of helper classes like IEnterpriseAuthenticationProviderFactoryManagementFactory.

Jerod does his best to avoid using the Enterprise Framework, but sometimes enterprise happens and he has no choice but to include it. Usually, it’s not that big of a deal, but when he was tasked with building a Windows client application that would be frequently deployed to mobile employees over a VPN over a cell-phone data connection, he needed to find a way to trim the size of the framework.

He only needed a single class – an “enterprise configuration provider” that, essentially, was a shoddy replacement for DNS – and, in theory, he’d only need a single assembly and maybe the small handful it referenced. Of course, in reality, every assembly seemed to reference every other assembly, and Jerod couldn’t figure out a way to separate them. So he turned to a dependency-mapping tool.

And after that tool crashed under the sheer weight of the Enterprise Framework, he turned to another tool. After struggling for a bit, it finally produced a dependency diagram.

(full-sized version)

Although he was never able to simplify the deployment of the framework, he did find a new desktop background.