Programming language neutral design pattern detection

Object-oriented design patterns offer a structural and behavioral solution for a given problem in a given context using basic building blocks. They are widely used in software engineering as they promote extensibility, testability, maintainability and reusability. However, besides their use, their detection also has a great significance in the industry. This paper first presents a general, programming language neutral model and architecture for automated design pattern detection in object-oriented source code. To validate the recognition-capability of the framework, we implemented a version to recognize design patterns in C#. To our knowledge, this is the first work in the field that examines source code written in C#. We also discuss actual results of running this implementation on a number of class libraries. These results can later be used as reference for other works focusing on the C# programming language.