Krzysztof Cwalina, author of the book Framework Design Guidelines: Conventions, Idioms, and Patterns for Reusable .NET Libraries has released a second revision of the Framework Design Guidelines Digest.

I’ve read Framework Design Guidelines a couple of years back and learned a whole lot from it. It definitely makes it to my top 5.

However, I’ve had problems convincing my staff members to read it, as it contains~400 pages of design tips, which are quite hard to read in succession.

The Framework Design Guidelines Digest narrows the basics down to 9 pages. I recommend everyone to download and read it every once in a while.

Quoting Krzysztof:

This document is a distillation and a simplification of the most basic guidelines described in detail in a book titled Framework Design Guidelines by Krzysztof Cwalina and Brad Abrams. Framework Design Guidelines were created in the early days of .NET Framework development. They started as a small set of naming and design conventions but have been enhanced, scrutinized, and refined to a point where they are generally considered the canonical way to design frameworks at Microsoft. They carry the experience and cumulative wisdom of thousands of developer hours over several versions of the .NET Framework.

Get it here.

I have been invited for a couple of weeks to do some coding standards work in a rather large IT department.

Basically the job is to evaluate their coding standards document and make sure it is enforced. Since coding standards documents are usually dropped on your table by your manager in your first day of work and they usually remain untouched, we have to come up with a solution that will actually force people to comply to these standards.

So I did some reading on FxCop and found this great video by Guy Smith-Ferrier that really brought me up to speed on writing custom FxCop rules in an hour. Writing these rules is a real pain and I’ll have to do my best to use existing rules and avoid creating new ones.

The only problem with using FxCop in order to apply these standards is that it will analyze entire assemblies and will produce a lot of warnings, as this IT department has dozens of large existing & legacy projects.

My challenge will be to make FxCop run without shouting too much on legacy code. I will continue to update as things progress.