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Krzysztof Cwalina

Designing Reusable Frameworks


PDC 2008 Talk: Framework Design GuidelinesOctober 30 2008

Our PDC talk has been posted on Channel9. http://channel9.msdn.com/pdc2008/PC58/.

Here is the talk summary:

Learn about guidelines that have helped the Microsoft .NET Framework grow into the most popular developer framework Microsoft has ever created. After ten years of use, we have an enormous amount of real customer data about what makes great framework design. Whether you are building your own framework or just want to get the most out of the .NET Framework, this is a must-attend talk! Join Krzysztof Cwalina and Brad Abrams, authors of the Dr. Dobbs award winning "Framework Design Guidelines" book, and get a sneak peek at the content from the 2nd edition (first available at PDC2008).

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Framework Design Guidelines VideosOctober 27 2008

Brad and I just did a couple of video interviews that are now accessible online.

In the first one, we are talking about our PDC presentation (for those at the PDC, it’s at 4pm today). You can get it at 10 Years of Framework Design Guidelines (video).

The second interview is about just released 2nd edition of the Framework Design Guidelines book. You can get the video at Framework Design Guidelines: Conventions, Idioms, and Patterns for Reusable .NET Libraries (video)

Enjoy!

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MEF on CodePlexSeptember 5 2008

 

We have just released an update to MEF. You can get it at http://www.codeplex.com/MEF

The changes are quite significant:

1.       The preview ships with sources under a very permissive license (Ms-LPL).

2.       We now support constructor injection. Feature that the community asked for.

3.       We completely redesigned MEF’s extensibility points. The extensibility points are designed to support writing custom providers of composition data. For example, out of the box MEF requires composable parts to be attributed with attributes that provide metadata describing the composition. We got lots of feedback that this is not acceptable in many scenarios. The new extensibility points make it easier to extend MEF to externalize the metadata (to an XML file for example). Note, that the changes are just the first step toward the goal of making the extensibility easy and powerful. We will most probably keep making improvements in this space in the future, so feedback on the new extensibility points would be more then welcome.

4.       We significantly cleaned up the container APIs. But as above, there is more clean up to come in the future.

 

Extensible Framework Design Studio ReleasedAugust 30 2008

This summer we had a high school intern, Nick Moloney, who worked on incorporating MEF into FDS. The fruits of his labor are now on code gallery. You can download the extensible FDS here. Congratulations to Nick!

The current release has just a few extensibility points, but you should expect more in the future. 

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API Design Myth: Exceptions are for "Exceptional Errors"July 17 2008

I was updating FDG section on exceptions. I added one anntation that I thought I would post here as well:

 

KRZYSZTOF CWALINA

One of the biggest misconceptions about exceptions is that they are for “exceptional conditions.” The reality is that they are for communicating error conditions. From a framework design perspective, there is no such thing as an “exceptional condition”. Whether a condition is exceptional or not depends on the context of usage, --- but reusable libraries rarely know how they will be used. For example, OutOfMemoryException might be exceptional for a simple data entry application; it’s not so exceptional for applications doing their own memory management (e.g. SQL server). In other words, one man’s exceptional condition is another man’s chronic condition.

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