Model-View-Presenter
In MVP, the Presenter contains the UI business logic for the View. All invocations from the View delegate directly to the Presenter. The Presenter is also decoupled directly from the View and talks to it through an interface. This is to allow mocking of the View in a unit test. One common attribute of MVP is that there has to be a lot of two-way dispatching. For example, when someone clicks the "Save" button, the event handler delegates to the Presenter's "OnSave" method. Once the save is completed, the Presenter will then call back the View through its interface so that the View can display that the save has completed.
MVP tends to be a very natural pattern for achieving separated presentation in WebForms. The reason is that the View is always created first by the ASP.NET runtime. You can find out more about both variants.
Two primary variations
Passive View: The View is as dumb as possible and contains almost zero logic. A Presenter is a middle man that talks to the View and the Model. The View and Model are completely shielded from one another. The Model may raise events, but the Presenter subscribes to them for updating the View. In Passive View there is no direct data binding, instead, the View exposes setter properties that the Presenter uses to set the data. All state is managed in the Presenter and not the View.
- Pro: maximum testability surface; clean separation of the View and Model
- Con: more work (for example all the setter properties) as you are doing all the data binding yourself.
Supervising Controller: The Presenter handles user gestures. The View binds to the Model directly through data binding. In this case, it's the Presenter's job to pass off the Model to the View so that it can bind to it. The Presenter will also contain logic for gestures like pressing a button, navigation, etc.
- Pro: by leveraging data binding the amount of code is reduced.
- Con: there's a less testable surface (because of data binding), and there's less encapsulation in the View since it talks directly to the Model.
Model-View-Controller
In the MVC, the Controller is responsible for determining which View to display in response to any action including when the application loads. This differs from MVP where actions route through the View to the Presenter. In MVC, every action in the View correlates with a call to a Controller along with an action. In the web, each action involves a call to a URL on the other side of which there is a Controller who responds. Once that Controller has completed its processing, it will return the correct View. The sequence continues in that manner throughout the life of the application:
Action in the View
-> Call to Controller
-> Controller Logic
-> Controller returns the View.
One other big difference about MVC is that the View does not directly bind to the Model. The view simply renders and is completely stateless. In implementations of MVC, the View usually will not have any logic in the code behind. This is contrary to MVP where it is absolutely necessary because, if the View does not delegate to the Presenter, it will never get called.
Presentation Model
One other pattern to look at is the Presentation Model pattern. In this pattern, there is no Presenter. Instead, the View binds directly to a Presentation Model. The Presentation Model is a Model crafted specifically for the View. This means this Model can expose properties that one would never put on a domain model as it would be a violation of separation-of-concerns. In this case, the Presentation Model binds to the domain model and may subscribe to events coming from that Model. The View then subscribes to events coming from the Presentation Model and updates itself accordingly. The Presentation Model can expose commands which the view uses for invoking actions. The advantage of this approach is that you can essentially remove the code-behind altogether as the PM completely encapsulates all of the behavior for the view. This pattern is a very strong candidate for use in WPF applications and is also called Model-View-ViewModel.
There is a MSDN article about the Presentation Model and a section in the Composite Application Guidance for WPF (former Prism) about Separated Presentation Patterns
There's a bit of a confusion here. Repositories access aggregate roots. Aggregate roots are entities. The reason for this is separation of concerns and good layering. This doesn't make sense on small projects, but if you're on a large team you want to say, "You access a product through the Product Repository. Product is an aggregate root for a collection of entities, including the ProductCatalog object. If you want to update the ProductCatalog you must go through the ProductRepository."
In this way you have very, very clear separation on the business logic and where things get updated. You don't have some kid who is off by himself and writes this entire program that does all these complicated things to the product catalog and when it comes to integrate it to the upstream project, you're sitting there looking at it and realize it all has to be ditched. It also means when people join the team, add new features, they know where to go and how to structure the program.
But wait! Repository also refers to the persistence layer, as in the Repository Pattern. In a better world an Eric Evans' Repository and the Repository Pattern would have separate names, because they tend to overlap quite a bit. To get the repository pattern you have contrast with other ways in which data is accessed, with a service bus or an event model system. Usually when you get to this level, the Eric Evans' Repository definition goes by the way side and you start talking about a bounded context. Each bounded context is essentially its own application. You might have a sophisticated approval system for getting things into the product catalog. In your original design the product was the center piece but in this bounded context the product catalog is. You still might access product information and update product via a service bus, but you must realize that a product catalog outside the bounded context might mean something completely different.
Back to your original question. If you're accessing a repository from within an entity it means the entity is really not a business entity but probably something that should exist in a service layer. This is because entities are business object and should concern themselves with being as much like a DSL (domain specific language) as possible. Only have business information in this layer. If you're troubleshooting a performance issue, you'll know to look elsewhere since only business information should be here. If suddenly, you have application issues here, you're making it very hard to extend and maintain an application, which is really the heart of DDD: making maintainable software.
Response to Comment 1: Right, good question. So not all validation occurs in the domain layer. Sharp has an attribute "DomainSignature" that does what you want. It is persistence aware, but being an attribute keeps the domain layer clean. It ensures that you don't have a duplicate entity with, in your example the same name.
But let's talk about more complicated validation rules. Let's say you're Amazon.com. Have you ever ordered something with an expired credit card? I have, where I haven't updated the card and bought something. It accepts the order and the UI informs me that everything is peachy. About 15 minutes later, I'll get an e-mail saying there's a problem with my order, my credit card is invalid. What's happening here is that, ideally, there's some regex validation in the domain layer. Is this a correct credit card number? If yes, persist the order. However, there's additional validation at the application tasks layer, where an external service is queried to see if payment can be made on the credit card. If not, don't actually ship anything, suspend the order and wait for the customer. This should all take place in a service layer.
Don't be afraid to create validation objects at the service layer that can access repositories. Just keep it out of the domain layer.
Best Answer
I think the term "repository" is commonly thought of in the way the "repository pattern" is described by the book Patterns of Enterprise Application Architecture by Martin Fowler.
On the surface, Entity Framework accomplishes all of this, and can be used as a simple form of a repository. However, there can be more to a repository than simply a data layer abstraction.
According to the book Domain Driven Design by Eric Evans, a repository has these advantages:
The first point roughly equates to the paragraph above, and it's easy to see that Entity Framework itself easily accomplishes it.
Some would argue that EF accomplishes the second point as well. But commonly EF is used simply to turn each database table into an EF entity, and pass it through to UI. It may be abstracting the mechanism of data access, but it's hardly abstracting away the relational data structure behind the scenes.
In simpler applications that mostly data oriented, this might not seem to be an important point. But as the applications' domain rules / business logic become more complex, you may want to be more object oriented. It's not uncommon that the relational structure of the data contains idiosyncrasies that aren't important to the business domain, but are side-effects of the data storage. In such cases, it's not enough to abstract the persistence mechanism but also the nature of the data structure itself. EF alone generally won't help you do that, but a repository layer will.
As for the third advantage, EF will do nothing (from a DDD perspective) to help. Typically DDD uses the repository not just to abstract the mechanism of data persistence, but also to provide constraints around how certain data can be accessed:
In other words, you would not have an 'AddressRepository' just because you have an Address table in your database. If your design chooses to manage how the Address objects are accessed in this way, the PersonRepository is where you would define and enforce the design choice.
Also, a DDD repository would typically be where certain business concepts relating to sets of domain data are encapsulated. An OrderRepository may have a method called OutstandingOrdersForAccount which returns a specific subset of Orders. Or a Customer repository may contain a PreferredCustomerByPostalCode method.
Entity Framework's DataContext classes don't lend themselves well to such functionality without the added repository abstraction layer. They do work well for what DDD calls Specifications, which can be simple boolean expressions sent in to a simple method that will evaluate the data against the expression and return a match.
As for the fourth advantage, while I'm sure there are certain strategies that might let one substitute for the datacontext, wrapping it in a repository makes it dead simple.
Regarding 'Unit of Work', here's what the DDD book has to say: