.NET standard library has holes

The .NET standard library is good, but it feels like it has lots of "holes" in it, even in 2.0. For instance, why is the Converter delegate used separately on Array's and List's ConvertAll rather than being defined on a Collection or an Enumerable so that I could use ConvertAll on things like Dictionary.KeyCollection? The answer, of course, is that Collection and Enumerable are actually ICollection and IEnumerable and are not classes.

So, Microsoft didn't choose to duplicate ConvertAll everywhere it'd be useful, just in a couple of places. What this means as well is that even though you can use a foreach loop on something, you can't necessarily do a ConvertAll on it (or use the other higher-order methods). In contrast, look at Ruby, where as long as you have an each method (IIRC), you get everything associated with it for free.

Also see Adam's description of GetValue and SetValue on properties and accessors, another case where Microsoft has the same method names for similar functionality on multiple classes but no common interface or base class between them, so they can't be used interchangeably. (Insert comment about the utility of duck-typing here...)

As an aside, I also feel like it's just darn hard to find things reliably in Microsoft's documentation.

Permalink | 4 Comments | Tags: .NET | id 8036

15:50 (utc-6)
edited: 16:53 (utc-6)