Client Customizations

Question

We have a product with an install base of about 50, over 50% of these installs have customizations in the code for the business logic, and that is currently done by huge IF and Switch statements.

We are currently in the process of updating the code to .NET 3.5 and would like to handle the customizations in a more managable way. The only ways we can think of at the moment are to either stick with the large IF and Switch statements or have seperate files within Source Code Control for each client, which again doesn't seem to be ideal.

Is there an accepted way of handling large numbers of customizations across a codebase?

Answer 1

Isn't this called inheritance? Having classes extend from base classes by adding custom functionality. Whenever I have a large number of If's or cases, I question whether I should refactor into multiple classes.