Just read a great post on Jeremy Miller's blog. He offers some general ways to get started learning design patterns in coding. Having started with Microsoft technologies, I felt overwhelmed by all the "stuff" that was needed to be done for what I thought should be simple operations...this is mostly because Microsoft doesn't encourage a knowledge of design patterns in all their examples and literature. This is changing now, I realize, but they are way behind the Java folks as far as I can tell (google seems to always send me into the Sun realm when I want to know a rich way to pattern a problem).This point became clearer for me when I read this post. I really appreciate what Dino Esposito has contributed to the community with his articles and books on ASP.NET, but I was kind of surprised that design patterns were a newer thing for him...but it's great to hear him aplying them and liking it.
I really didn't know what to look for in architecture because everywhere I looked in Microsoft, they were just throwing DataSets at me telling me to stick them in my code-behind pages...hardly a peep about rich Domain layers or enforcing clean separation of concerns among layers in my apps. Being a lone ranger and my own development team, I HAVE to write code that is easy to maintain and scales well...Design Patterns are a required resource in the toolbox for this situation.