Application review: Northwind Starter Kit

I continue to try to find a sample application for Northwind to use as my contrasting example for an article that I am writing, and I found the Northwind Starter Kit project. Even the project summary page gave me a few twitches, here is a small piece with the twitch inducing stuff bolded:

The application has been designed using common patterns, such as the ones defined within the "classic" "Designs Patterns" by Erich Gamma et al. and "Pattern of Enterprise Application Architecture", by Martin Fowler; though not required, these lectures are strongly recommended.

Guys! This is Northwind, the likelihood that you’ll need design patterns to build this application is nil to none! That just screens complexity overload.

Domain logic is implemented by means of a Domain Model, onto a layer of services adds application logic. The model is persisted by a DAL designed around the principles of the "Repository" patterns, which has been implemented in a LINQ-friendly way.

Northwind is a CRUD app, at its core, all of those things are adding complexity, and they aren’t really adding much at all. In fact, they are going to create just noise, and make working with things that much harder.

And then I opened the project, and I got this:

I mean, really? Seriously?!  22(!) projects to do a sample application using Northwind?

This is the point where I gave up on this as something that could be useful, but here are a few other gems as well:

I really like how the Update method does what it is meant to do, right?

Note that in either implementation, we are looking at totally and drastically different behavior.

Let us look at the interface, too:

The design is straight out of Patterns of Enterprise Application Architecture, and it is totally the wrong design to be using if you are using a modern OR/M.

Seriously, this is Northwind we are talking about, why make things so freaking complex?!