Keith Devens .com - Weblog: .NET standard library has holes

Friday, March 24, 2006

.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)

Comments

Microsoft's documentation sucks, as a first-degree approximation.

Granted that things look different in Windows XP vs. Windows 2000, etc., but the WinForms documentation doesn't even give baseline looks of the different controls. Sure "we all know what a progress bar looks like", but what does it look like when set to Style=Marquee?

Microsoft puts in a lot of effort to get every method, event, and property documented on their .NET classes. Which is like explaining how each phoneme sounds, but then not telling you how to put words into sentances.

The docs for common string formatting codes is unbelievably bad and spread out compared to, say, almost any other C++ printf cheat-sheet I've ever seen.

And so forth!

∴ Adam Vandenberg | 27-Mar-2006 2:32pm est | http://adamv.com/ | #9356

Amen on the docs, but I'd add that the documentation sucks from a navigation standpoint too. Some of Java's documentation might suck, but at least the navigation makes some kind of sense.

However, the FCL and sundry have more fundamental flaws. By way of demonstration, try calling .ToString() on just about anything. Rather than getting a reasonable stringified version of the object, you just get the cryptic default junk generated by Object's implementation. For instance, does an instance of XmlElement return the XML fragment it represents? Nope.

That's just plain idiotic.

∴ Keith Gaughan | 28-Mar-2006 5:43pm est | http://talideon.com/ | #9357

Yes! I've been annoyed that most of .NET's classes don't stringify into anything useful.

∴ Keith | 28-Mar-2006 9:02pm est | http://keithdevens.com/ | #9358

∴ Adam Vandenberg | 3-Apr-2006 2:32pm est | http://adamv.com/ | #9375

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