Identity Interface

Slim Timer is great web based task tracker and timer.
It also has some great reporting built in.
Check it out.

Every place of employment has their favorite patterns and this one is no different.
Lazy Loading is a common theme amongst many of of the entities.

Basically take a property and in the get, check for null. If its null then load using a manager or something. If its not null then the list has been loaded.
It really only works for lists.

I think if you are going to do a SOA app, you should stick with the philosophy of plain old clr objects (poco) and just leave your accessors alone. Put the loading logic in a manager and load explicitly. It can become a hidden performance issue, when lists are just loading when you look at them.

The method I am talking about above is called Lazy Initialization (Fowler)
There are also several other types of Lazy Loading Fowler talks about including: Virtual Proxy, Value Holder, and Using Ghosts

The Ghost pattern looks as though it may overcome the hidden performance problem by creating a lazy loading supertype that wraps the load status. So you can tell if the list is of type “ghost”, “loading” or “loaded” A ghost would mean that the property should be lazy loaded when the oppurtunity arose. The problem I have with this, is the extra complexity of adding more layers.

In the end for me, it just seems easier to develop a robust manager architecture where explicit loads are easy and intuitive.

Fowler Martin. Patterns of Enterprise Architecture. 2003.

Before you go out and drop some extension methods on System.Object, read the this addendum on framework design guidelines for C# 3.0.