The current requirements aren’t the only ones.

A big difference between the projects we do at Stimulant and those I’ve done previously is longevity. In game development (and in most of the Flash projects I’ve worked on, which are many), you ship the project and it’s unlikely that the code will ever be seen again. If you’re able to come back to a project after a day or a week and are still able to figure it out, you’re doing good (enough). And even then, I was pushing for sensible patterns and tight documentation.

As we internally discuss v1.5 and v2 releases of previous projects, it becomes even more important that code is legible to and flexible for my future self and future developers.

Getting things working is only half the problem. Applications need controls which are flexible visually (so designers can work with them after they’re functionally complete), broken into small enough pieces to be understood by future developers, and designed with the assumption that most requirements can and will change in future versions.

I’m developing my own best practices to achieve these goals, but I’d love to see more examples of extra-flexible WPF and Silverlight applications to borrow from.

Yes, I’m reading Code Complete and getting religion.