Abstract factory design pattern implementation in .NET framework

What is abstract factory pattern?

See Wikipedia, dofactory, Sourcemaking, oodesign, etc..

.NET framework uses/implements many design patterns, abstract factory is one such.

System.Data.Common.DbProviderFactory is an implementation of abstract factory pattern. Every method in this class is an implementation of Factory method pattern.

DbProviderFactory is inherited by the following Concrete factories SqlClientFactory, OdbcFactory, OracleClientFactory, etc. They implement the operations declared in DbProviderFactory to communicate with specific database implementations.

Every concrete factory can build a Concrete product, in this case, SqlClientFactory.CreateConnection() will return an abstract DbConnection whose concrete type will be a SqlConnection instance.

public abstract class DbProviderFactory
{
    public virtual DbCommand CreateCommand()
    {
      return (DbCommand) null;
    }

    public virtual DbCommandBuilder CreateCommandBuilder()
    {
      return (DbCommandBuilder) null;
    }

    public virtual DbConnection CreateConnection()
    {
      return (DbConnection) null;
    }

    public virtual DbConnectionStringBuilder CreateConnectionStringBuilder()
    {
      return (DbConnectionStringBuilder) null;
    }

    public virtual DbDataAdapter CreateDataAdapter()
    {
      return (DbDataAdapter) null;
    }

    public virtual DbParameter CreateParameter()
    {
      return (DbParameter) null;
    }

    public virtual CodeAccessPermission CreatePermission(PermissionState state)
    {
      return (CodeAccessPermission) null;
    }

    public virtual DbDataSourceEnumerator CreateDataSourceEnumerator()
    {
      return (DbDataSourceEnumerator) null;
    }

    public virtual bool CanCreateDataSourceEnumerator
    {
      get
      {
        return false;
      }
    }
}

Usage of DbProviderFactory:

// Source: https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/dotnet/framework/data/adonet/obtaining-a-dbproviderfactory
// Given a provider name and connection string,
// create the DbProviderFactory and DbConnection.
// Returns a DbConnection on success; null on failure.
static DbConnection CreateDbConnection(string providerName, string connectionString)
{
    // Assume failure.
    DbConnection connection = null;

    // Create the DbProviderFactory and DbConnection.
    if (connectionString != null)
    {
        try
        {
            DbProviderFactory factory = DbProviderFactories.GetFactory(providerName);
            connection = factory.CreateConnection();
            connection.ConnectionString = connectionString;
        }
        catch (Exception ex)
        {
            // Set the connection to null if it was created.
            if (connection != null)
            {
                connection = null;
            }
            Console.WriteLine(ex.Message);
        }
    }
    // Return the connection.
    return connection;
}

See a stackoverflow discussion on using MySQL with this approach!

Abstract factory class diagram