Lead developers on the .NET team teach best practices for designing system frameworks and reusable libraries for use with .NET. • • Completely revised for .NET 3.5, with 100 pages of new material • Frameworks and libraries can help developers be much more productive • Provides not just the guidelines themselves, but also many annotations that explain the finer points of using them. • The authors are the architects of the Framework Guidelines, and this book is the definitive guide to them. In the past, reusable API design was the domain of only a handful of large software vendors. There has been a steady increase in interest in API design after the invention and widespread adoption of reusable component technologies: COM, CORBA, and recently .NET. Today, most new software projects contain some reusable APIs. Microsoft is giving the message that careful design of public APIs is crucial to realizing the full potential of software reuse. These .NET Framework Design Guidelines were created in the early days of the development of .NET. They started as a small set of naming and design conventions but have been enhanced, scrutinized, and refined to a point where they are generally considered the canonical way to design frameworks at Microsoft. They carry the experience and cumulative wisdom of thousands of developer hours over three versions of .NET. The authors avoid having the text based purely on some idealistic design philosophies, and have made it an intensely pragmatic book. The book contains many annotations that explain tradeoffs, history, amplify or provide critiquing views on the guidelines. The previous edition of this book has been widely praised, and has sold very well. This edition brings the book up to date with version 3.5 of .NET, and adds about 100 pages of new content.