Online publishers have started shipping the Framework Design Guidelines book. Before, it was pre-order-only. I think Brad and I deserve a ship party :-) BTW, “ship party” is the term we use at Microsoft for a party we organize for ourselves after releasing...

Addison Wesley, the publisher of the Framework Design Guidelines book has posted a freely downloadable chapter . The chapter talks about type design.

We don’t recommend using List<T> in public APIs for two reasons. List<T> is not designed to be extended. i.e. you cannot override any members. This for example means that an object returning List<T> from a property won’t be able...

Many people ask how the new.NET Framework 2.0 generic collections relate to the non-generic collections we shipped before. So, here you go. The most important types are in bold font. List<T> is basically a better ArrayList. It is optimized for...

I just found a very interesting blog written by Dave Green (an architect of the Windows Workflow Foundation). One of the posts explains the main motivations for creating a workflow framework. In general I am a big fan of the work this team has done...

I just wanted to blog about some interesting API design discussion we had recently . We discussed whether to relax the event design guidelines to allow value type "event args." This would make raising some events cheaper. public struct SomethingHappenedEventArgs...

I found a very encouraging post about the new tracing APIs that we added to .NET Framework 2.0. Kathleen Dollard wrote : “ Sometimes Microsoft absolutely amazes me. I know .NET is big, and I know that the 2.0 release is rather overwhelming even to Softies...

I just wanted to post something to summarize the PDC 2005. PDC started for me on Monday. Brad and I were presenting at a precon on Designing Reusable APIs. 6 hours total. The slides can be downloaded here . We were tweaking slides till midnight...

Since I have been preparing for the PDC and finishing the book , I neglected blogging. All ideas for posts were just ending up in the “to do” folder (yes, Outlook drives my life J). Now, I will try to catch up. I was reading Paul Grahm’s essay on Design...