Adopting the Web Client Software Factory in existing Web applications

During the WC-SF workshop and after spending valuable time with customers one of the questions that came up is how do I integrate the WC-SF with my existing Web client application?. Michael has just posted and excellent entry explaining how to enable the guidance package in a non-WC-SF solution.

Here I’m adding some tips that you might want to take into account if you are looking forward to use the WC-SF with existing Web applications:

• To minimize the amount of code re-writing and modification, try to wrap existing business logic in CWAB (Composite Web Application Block) services and store them in business modules. This will not only save you some time, but it will also increase the testability surface of your solution because you will be able to replace the services with mock implementations.
• Encapsulate shared components like security and data access providers in global services (you can place them in foundational modules).
• Don’t try to migrate the whole solution to use the patterns suggested by the factory at once, do baby steps. Start implementing small new areas with the WC-SF approach first, one at a time, and analyze the results. Once you and your team feel comfortable with the factory, start migrating existing items if needed.
• If your application contains areas that mainly perform simple CRUD operations, you might want to move them to one or more business modules and to avoid using the module controller for them. Module controllers follow the Application Controller pattern (see the WC-SF docs for more information), which might not be the best solution in these scenarios because usually there is little or no page flow / business logic in them. In these cases, you could wrap the existing business-specific data access logic in module services and consume them directly from your presenters.
• Customize the guidance package according to your needs. One change you will find useful for existing solutions is to update the view’s template to use your own master page instead of the default one that you get when using the Web Client Solution template. You can find the template in WebClientFactoryPackage\Templates\T4\View\View.aspx.t4.