Interface Reutilization (embedding) for Large Projects

Question

First of all, sorry for any english mistakes. Its my first post on Stack Overflow and english is not my native language.

Im facing a problem on a web project being currently developed here at my company. We are making a large overhaul at a legacy application.

The application is being built by different teams in a manner that one team is writing a framework/foundation application that will be consumed by all the other applications (think as modules or even standalone satellite applications). All the applications are currently being written in ASP.NET MVC 3. and the framework (and the others) have views, models, controllers and static resources as any mvc applications (like the login screen, the menus, layouts, etc).

Currently we are organizing the projects like desired using a modified version of the MVCContrib Portable Areas.

My.Framework.Web
My.Sales.Web
My.Customer.Web

The MVCContrib project seems kinda of dead right now and we are looking for other approaches to solve this particular situation.

So my question is: We are doing this the right way? i mean, there is another way to treat a situation where strong interface reuse between projects are a necessity? This seems to me like a common situation but could not find anything similar (on scale) on the internet or books.

Best regards.

Answer 1

You can go with something like these:

• The MVCContrib way (as you mentioned)
• Griffin's MVC Plugin system
• Simple MVC Areas solution

I think they are all have a disadvantage that is you need to copy View and Content files if you don't want them to be in your plugin assembly. But if you want to, you can use razorgenerator that can embed views in your assembly. So you can create areas then embed all of stuff in area assembly using razorgenerator and them reference it in your host project and register that area.

BTW, I think your application architecture (that is like Composite Web Application) is good for creating several products that have similar services or modules in them.