Framework Design Guidelines: Conventions, Idioms, and Patterns for Reusable .NET Libraries

Chapter 1. Introduction

IF YOU COULD STAND over the shoulder of every developer who is using your framework to write code and explain how it is supposed to be used, guidelines would not be necessary. These guidelines give you, as the framework author, a palette of tools that allow you to form a common language between framework authors and the developers who will use the frameworks. For example, exposing an operation as a property instead of exposing it as a method conveys vital information about how that operation is to be used.

In the early days of the PC era, the main tools for developing applications were a programming language compiler, a very small set of standard libraries, and the raw operating system application programming interfaces ...