September 2005 - Posts

Ship Party!
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 Read More...
Posted 30 September 05 05:49 by kcwalina | 2 Comments   
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Free Chapter from the Framework Design Guidelines Book
Addison Wesley, the publisher of the Framework Design Guidelines book has posted a freely downloadable chapter . The chapter talks about type design. Read More...
Posted 30 September 05 05:31 by kcwalina | 2 Comments   
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Why we don’t recommend using List<T> in public APIs
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 to get Read More...
Posted 26 September 05 12:35 by kcwalina | 28 Comments   
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System.Collections vs. System.Collection.Generic and System.Collections.ObjectModel
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 speed, Read More...
Posted 23 September 05 08:10 by kcwalina | 23 Comments   
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Workflow Application Model
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 Read More...
Posted 22 September 05 05:47 by kcwalina | 0 Comments   
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Value Type EventArgs
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 Read More...
Posted 21 September 05 08:30 by kcwalina | 6 Comments   
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Tracing APIs in .NET Framework 2.0
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, Read More...
Posted 20 September 05 07:00 by kcwalina | 1 Comments   
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PDC 2005 Summary
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. When Read More...
Posted 20 September 05 06:09 by kcwalina | 1 Comments   
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The Role of the API designer: Design what the user needs
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 Read More...
Posted 20 September 05 06:37 by kcwalina | 0 Comments   
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