Bill Blogs in C#

Another Book Review

I received a care package from Addison-Wesley the other day: My reviewer copy of the .NET Framework Standard Library Annotated Reference, Vol 2 (SLAR II).

This is a reference book, and as such, it is very dry reading. In fact, much of the text is verbatim from the ECMA standard for the pertinent portion of .NET framework library (in this case, Networking, Reflection, and XML processing). The real value in this book is in the annotations. There are many annotations on the classes, members, and namespaces documented here. These comments are everything from historical notes, reasons for inclusion (or exclusion of other possible features), design goals, and even the occasional apology where one of the framework designers felt they should have done better.

To close, I’ll quote myself from the inside cover: “The .NET Framework Standard Library Annotated Reference is the one reference you really need when you use the .NET Framework library. The annotations provide clear insight into the design choices that the library development team made when building the library. Those explanations will guide you to the best design choices for your own application code.”