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Book: Framework Design Guidelines (aka FDGCIPRNLMDS)

The book ‘Framework Design Guidelines’ is high on many .NET programmer’s recommended reading lists, so I decided to finally try it out.

To me, it scored bad points for its awfully long subtitle (Conventions, Idioms, and Patterns for Reusable .NET Libraries — Microsoft .NET Development Series). We’ll refer to it as FDGCIPRNL as a form of silent protest hereafter.

Luckily all is more than made up for having “Krzysztof Cwalina” as one of the author’s names. Can’t do better than that myself.

On to the content.

Book cover: Framework Design Guidelines

The book is based on internal documentation used by the creators of the .NET framework (which is better designed than other similar frameworks that I know). It gives great insight in the design process and the many trade-offs involved.

Even though the reader might never implement a large framework himself (a framework is designed to be extended, while a library is not), FDGCIPRNLMDS still is valuable in helping better understand the framework that you program against.

The book is also stuffed with generic advice about programming .NET: which classes to avoid, how to name fields, how to deal with exceptions, etcetera.

From time to time, a contributing author comments on the topic at hand in a small blurb, which gives many of the sections a nice personal touch.

Contrary to most technical books, FDGCIPRNLMDS was actually a pretty quick read. All in all, a recommended book for .NET programmers but not so much for practitioners of other platforms. For them, the advice and insight is too biased towards the .NET framework only.

The book I’m reading next seems a much tougher nut to crack, but I’m making progress.

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This entry was posted on Thursday, February 14th, 2008 at 22:40 and is filed under Aanrader, Books, English, Technology. You can subscribe via RSS 2.0 feed to this post's comments. You can comment below, or link to this permanent URL from your own site. Your comments will appear immediately, but I reserve the right to delete innapropriate comments.

4 Comments on “Book: Framework Design Guidelines (aka FDGCIPRNLMDS)”

  1. TimothyP Says:
    February 15th, 2008 at 0:37

    I’ve heard about this book many times, perhaps I’ll have to add it to my reading list :-)
    But today I just got 2 new ones I need to read through.

    Composite UI Application Block and Smart Client Software Factory (MSPRESS)
    Learning WCF (O’Reilly)

    Have you tried WPF yet, because at the time I don’t see any real reason to
    use WPF as opposed to SWF. It seems the use of WPF is a lot harder to justify
    than WCF and WF (the latter is my favorite component of 3.0/3.5)

  2. fl0 Says:
    February 15th, 2008 at 10:08

    No, I’m not into WCF/WPF/SWF stuff. Actually, I haven’t touched any 3.0/3.5 parts yet.

  3. Jan Van Ryswyck Says:
    February 15th, 2008 at 21:01

    Let me guess wich book you are reading now: Code Complete? ;-) . Framework Design Guidelines gets a second edition somewhere this year. It adds the new language constructs in C# and some revised guidelines. Definitely worth a third read for me :-) .

    Cheers,

    Jan

  4. fl0 Says:
    February 16th, 2008 at 10:45

    Actually, it’s not .NET related… As I said, low-level stuff. You’ll see :-)

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