Framework Design Guidelines

First things first, I'm a strong advocate that every .Net developer should read the book Framework Design Guidelines by Krzysztof Cwalina and Brad Abrams. (ISBN: 0321246756) I've read it 3 times from front to back and refer to it on almost a daily basis. As this reviewer puts it, "Nothing less than wisdom distilled".

Nothing less than wisdom distilled, November 7, 2005

Reviewer:

John Gossman (Seattle, wa USA) - See all my reviews

At Microsoft I work on a development team that has been using the guidelines from this book for nearly 4 years. I am not always a fan of coding standards, thinking they are a necessary evil, often simply arbitrary choices made for consistency.

The Framework Design Guidelines are different. These ensure deep consistency across not just source code, but more importantly the public classes themselves. They include critical, not to be ignored rules on security, cross-language access and localization, as well as the usual good practice type guidelines. But even these "good" practices are always backed with well reasoned argument and examples. As an added bonus FxCop provides a static analysis tool that enforces the guidelines.

Finally, the Framework Design Guidelines provide deep insight into how the .NET Frameworks are designed and used. With the guidelines in mind it is far easier to remember or even guess what classes are provided and how they should be used. This just makes the libraries that much more productive.

The insights enclosed show the trials and tribulations Microsoft had developing the .NET Framework and will surely help you prevent the same problems in your software designs.