Brad Abrams

Paul Vick chimes in on default arguments . He has some good points; I can believe the main problem with my example is one of generally bad API design. But I think the technical issue of the default arguments being burned into the callsite still exists...

I just stumbled across this guideline in the Design Guidelines document and I thought it needed more explanation.. Do argument validation . Do not assume enum arguments will be in the defined range. It is legal to cast any integer value into...

Hillel points out a cool site making fun of bad design… I find so many parallels in these kind of design issues and API design. Anyway, I was excited to see that the site offers Xml Syndication, which I assumed was an RSS feed, but it is not.. in a...

JasonZ mentions he will be at the TwinCities .NET User Group on 12/4/03... Should be a good chance to get to know the person in charge of the CLR team.

Jeremy notes a 2 nd chance at a few of the more popular PDC sessions…

Some guidelines in the Design Guidelines Document and described in my blog are based on years of experience with managed code and a deep understanding of how developers think about problems and how the runtime really works… And other guidelines…well...

I was recently asked about why the CLS (and the Design Guidelines) discourages default arguments. So I added this annotation to the Design Guidelines document. I believe it is the same reason why C# (rightfully) left it out of the language. ...

Interop whitepaper with guidelines on how/when to use CLR and C++ interop is now published on MSDN. Link is: http://msdn.microsoft.com/netframework/default.aspx?pull=/library/en-us/dndotnet/html/manunmancode.asp

Fairly minor update -- as always, let me know if there are questions or comments. --------------------------------------------------------- Consider using abstract classes (even if there are no abstract members) if the class is designed to be...

Christopher Brown talks about the 64bit framework in a comment We definitely plan to support both IA-64 and AMD64 with 32 bit and full 64 bit native frameworks when Whidbey ships. At PDC time, our efforts were serialized and the AMD framework...

At my .NET Framework Overview presentation at the PDC someone asked me for a list of the members we are obsoleting in Whidbey. The idea being if we tell you now what will be obsoleted in Whidbey you will have more information about what to use today...

As I am sure many of you have heard we are adding a cool new namespace in Whidbey… System.Collections.Generics… It contains generic versions of the collections you know and love today. List<T>, Dictionary<K, V>, etc In addition we are...

Steven Clarke added a recent comment to my blog that I thought was worth highlighting: Systematic programmers tend to follow a defensive coding style. They do not make assumptions about the code they are writing, the platform it runs on, the class...

Wow – thanks for your feedback on this issue . I am going to start bringing you people more of my hard problems. As of a few minutes ago the consensus seems to be slightly in favor or going with methods in the case I outlined (about 16 pro methods...

I am sure some of you have already figured it out, but you can get an RSS feed for the comments on my blog . In addition, this format should work for anyone on gotdotnet… http://blogs.gotdotnet.com/ID/blogxbrowsing.asmx/GetCommentsRss So, for...

Long overdue update the the guidelines on Explicit member implementation. As always, feedback welcome. Explicit Member Implementation Explicit member implementation allows an interface member to be implemented such that it is only available...

Steven talks about API Usability and even asks you to sign up to go to API usability tests. He makes a point that I use often… I call it the “design in reverse” principle. B efore you write any of your framework, write a simple app that uses it...

It is an age old debate… we have some fairly good guidelines , but they certainly leave room for improvement. Today at a WinFX API review (for some cool stuff that didn’t make it out in the PDC drop) we had the debate again… Today the APIs look ...

I made some very minor updates to the threading guidelines... Please let me know if there are questions or comments. Do not lock on any public types or other instances you do not control. Notice the common construct: lock (this) violates this...

At the PDC JimAll mentioned we are doing painstaking API reviews of all of WinFX… Tomorrow we are doing our * 3 rd * round on System.Windows.Controls (I am reviewing something slightly more up to date)…. I will let you know if anything fun comes out...

Check it out... http://msdn.microsoft.com/msdntv/episode.aspx?xml=episodes/en/20031107WINFXBA/manifest.xml What is WinFX -The New Programming Interface Introduced in Windows "Longhorn" Learn the object-oriented, managed API for the breadth of...

I have known Marc for a while, but I just checked out his blog .. Very cool stuff. He gives some great real world data on interop , exceptions and he even writes the first WinFX app in SML …. Subscribed.

I just got a copy of Jim Miller’s new book: The Common Language Infrastructure Annotated Standard . Very cool to see the CLI spec in this hardcover format. Jim included many helpful annotations as well. My favorite part is Appendix D which includes...

At the PDC it was clear that many of our customers love generics and want to know about how they are really implemented. We were lucky enough to have a couple of very skilled folks from inside Microsoft Research do a lot of the initial implementation...

Anthony Moore , BCL DevLead comments on the .NET Framework DateTime support on Raymond’s excellent blog .