How Did I Miss This?!?

With the release of .NET 3.5 and Visual Studio 2008, Microsoft will also release selected bits of the .NET Framework source code!  With comments intact no less!

To me, this is good news; very good news I mean, there are a variety of reasons, but mostly because I know that most people don’t have the time, motivation, or energy to work through a book like Framework Design Guidelines.

My hope is that the Microsoft team, in doing so, will spur a movement within development teams to adopt better programming standards which are more aligned with the Base Class Libraries in naming, design, and architecture.  It should, hopefully, serve as a model to how things should be done in the post VBScript/VB6 days.

I just cringe sometimes when I dig into our codebase and find crazy things like methods not named as verb phrases, partial classes because a single file was getting too big (total abuse of partial classes instead of considering an object oriented approach to break down a large class), weird class names, catch blocks which have no code, and so on.

So for me, this is certainly good news and I hope to continue to form better practices as I get the opportunity to dive into the code.