As weird as it might sound, you are reading a book that was born almost accidentally. When we began to work on this material, we weren’t even thinking of writing a book. Our initial, quite unpretentious goal was to define a list of guidelines for internal use in Code Architects, the software company we founded in 2002.

We founded Code Architects when we realized the extent of the Microsoft .NET Framework potential and the impact it would have on the developers’ community and on the way enterprise-level applications are designed and implemented. Before long, we found ourselves working on software projects that included 400,000 lines of code, mainly written in C# but with some portions developed with Visual Basic. Projects of this size are simply too large for just one or two programmers, and you need more than plain good will to write them in an orderly way. Instead, you need coding discipline and, above all, a set of well-defined and proven guidelines. These guidelines are essential when many developers with different expertise levels and knowledge backgrounds work at the same project.

In the long run, our initial checklist of recommended practices grew in size and included special cases and exceptions meant to accommodate the imperfect world of software development. We also added code examples and short sample projects. But foremost, we discussed nearly all the guidelines in our internal forum and weighed the opinions of Code Architect’s’ team of .NET experts, which includes renowned writers and conference speakers (who are mentioned as they deserve in the acknowledgment section at the end of this introduction). We finally realized that many developers all around the world might benefit from our efforts, so we proposed the book to Microsoft Press. To our astonishment, they accepted the proposal within a couple of hours. Wow! That was fast, even in the fast world of the Internet!

Download pdf Code Architects Practical Guidelines Introduction