Practical Guidelines and Best Practices for Microsoft Visual Basic and Visual C# Developers by Francesco Balena (.Net2TheMax Team) - Code Architects Srl       A unique collection of 700+ guidelines for writing more robust, efficient, secure, and reusable .NET applications, with many examples and a clear explanation of when a rule is valid and when it isn't.  Printer friendly version

This book is easily the most complete and coherent collection of coding guidelines for .NET developers, with over 700 rules orderly organized in 33 chapters. These rules derive from coding guidelines used internally in Code Architects, the software company founded and run by the two authors, Francesco Balena and Giuseppe Dimauro.

The first section of the book covers coding tips related to assemblies, namespaces, classes, structures, interfaces, enums, fields, methods, properties, events, delegates, execution flows, error handling, data types, arrays and collections. For each rule you can read the whys and whynots, an explanation of the benefits the rule brings, and clear examples in both VB.NET and C# (except when the rule applies to one language only). By following these rules you can write efficient and robust software that is easily maintained, debugged, and extended, and you can learn how to avoid some recurring problems and elusive bugs. Interestingly, for rules related to naming conventions - which don't usually affect performance or robustness - an alternative rule is often offered, so that readers can pick up the rule that better fits their coding style.

The second section of the book is devoted to .NET best practices, and includes long chapters on files, XML data, threading, P/Invoke and COM interop, Windows Forms and Web Form applications, ADO.NET, Web services, remoting, serviced components, security and cryptography. For example, these rules cover a thorough discussion about where to keep state in ASP.NET applications, how to write bullet-proof Web sites, how to write Win32 applications compatible with Tablet PC computers and that are easily localized for other countries, how to protect from common threats such as SQL injection, cross-site scripting, and deserialization attacks.

To understand more about this unique book, read the Table of Contents, the Foreword by John Robbins, and the Introduction by the two authors.

To have an idea of how the material is organized and presented, read Chapter 6, "Types", Chapter 23, "Memory Usage", and Chapter 31, "Serviced Components."

Readers can download the book's source code and a Word doc that contains all the 700+ guidelines in the form of a printable checklist, that you can use during code reviews.

As of this writing, this book as no errata file.

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Francesco Balena - Code Architects Srl