Web Application Development with Microsoft Technologies

Even when I work for a huge IT Company, coding standards are always a problem.

Available .NET standards used to be long, complex, and sometimes hard to comply with. We finally end up customizing some Microsoft official coding standard and set up FxCop to check the code for compliance with MS Guidelines.

Well, after reading latest Scott’s post, I end up finding this excellent C# Coding Standard Guidelines  from IDesign team.

This standard looks neat. Simple but complete at the same time. It not only includes C# Coding Guidelines, but also Best Practices for having a better code, configuring security at different levels, Projects settings, and many other useful best practices, applied to several areas such as ASP.NET, Web Services, Remoting, Threading or Data Access. And everything using only 25 pages.

Great start point for those who are looking for a complete C# Coding Standard or Guidelines Checklist!

I’ll start to customize it right away for my particular needs.

I hope it helps you too.

Excellent news from Scott (Microsoft Technologies General Manager):

We will be able to Debug the .NET Framework 3.5 Source Code ! Yes, as you read it !

When releasing .NET 3.5 and Visual Studio 2008, Microsoft will enable us to download and browse the Source Code of the .NET Base Class Libraries (System, System.IO, System.Collections, System.Configuration, System.Threading, System.Net, System.Security, System.Runtime, System.Text, etc), ASP.NET (System.Web), Windows Forms (System.Windows.Forms), ADO.NET (System.Data), XML (System.Xml), and WPF (System.Windows).  They also aimed to add more libraries in the following months (including WCF, Workflow, and LINQ).  Source code will be released under the Microsoft Reference License (MS-RL).

Visual Studio 2008 will be enabled to download the source code and debug symbols on demand from a Microsoft web server, so when pressing F11 in a breakpoint, we will be able to go through the underlying Microsoft .NET Code, even if you haven’t installed it as a standalone install!

I think this are great news, this will help us to understand those weird behaviors we sometimes don’t understand and then building better applications for our customers. And there won’t be any need of using any Reflection tool and no IL, just a commented and with original var names Source Code!

New VS 2008 has a small but very useful feature that will probably help some asp.net programmers.
Right now, when using VS 2005 and if you don’t have much time to fix all the errors in the Error List because your HTML code is not in compliance to the required standard (HTML or XHTML) and you are in a hurry to run your application by hitting F5, then you  probably  feel very upset when you see a large list of design errors (HTML, CSS and JavaScript) and application just don’t run.

VS 2008 Beta 2, downgrades Markup errors to Warnings, and even when you don’t complain to selected standard, the list of errors would become a list of warnings, or messages if you prefer, and VS will let you run your application smoothly.

Well, even when this small tip can save you some time, don’t use it to avoid Standards compliance

I just found this 500 pages word document, containing the full C# Language Specs for 1.0, 2.0 and the new 3.0 C# version.

 Even the doc is quite long (of course I haven’t went into it entirely YET), it must be the best and the most authoritative reference for the C# language, because it was written by its own creators !

The document is well organized, includes syntax definitions, examples, and instructions for using all the language features, including latest additions for the new release, such as Linq and Lambda expressions. C# 3.0 is included in latest .NET 3.5 release.

I hope you find it useful, I think it has huge value and will help you with any doubt regarding the C# features set, and exploiting all its potential as well.