UML for the Software Developer, Part 5: Component Diagrams : Page 3

How Components Exist in .NET
The last topic that I want to discuss is how components are implemented in .NET. In my first article, "Building Classes," I discussed namespaces. I showed how a namespace is nothing more than a programmatic way to prevent naming collisions by prefixing variables with the same names with a namespace. From an architectural view a namespace can be used to identify parts of an architectural pattern. In the case of MVC there would be three namespaces:

            namespace Model { }
            namespace View { }
            namespace Controller {}

The namespaces in .NET can exist across classes and assemblies so that multiple components can be added to an assembly. Assemblies are the same as components. Each assembly contains one or more portable executables (PEs) that contain multiple classes compiled into MSIL (Microsoft's intermediate code). The assemblies also contain a manifest that tracks the variable names, the number of classes, types, and metadata for the assembly.

In the Richman, Inc. example I could add each component to its own assembly but use the appropriate namespace across the components in the model, view and controller. It is also possible (although it cannot be done through Visual Studio) to add more than one component in each assembly and have three assemblies for model, view, and controller respectively. Depending upon the size of the program it is best to remember that the fewer the assemblies the easier it is to deploy.

So far I have gone from class diagrams to deployment diagrams. The link between the abstract classes and how they are deployed are components that contain multiple classes and are grouped logically so that they can be deployed. The final article in this series, coming next month, will cover sequence diagrams.

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