Information Technology Reference
In-Depth Information
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4
Working with the Framework
My friend and colleague Martin Shoemaker crated a roundtable called “Do
I Have to Write That .NET Code?” shortly after .NET was first released in
2002. It was a great roundtable back then, and it's much more relevant
now. The .NET Framework has grown and now includes many more new
classes and features than it did back then. It's important that you don't
create features that already exist.
The .NET Framework is a rich class library. The more you learn about the
framework, the less code you need to write yourself. The framework library
will do more of the work for you. Sadly, the Base Class Library must now
contend with the problems associated with release 4. There are better ways
to solve problems than existed in release 1. But the framework team can't
just delete those old APIs and classes. It may not even make sense to mark
those older APIs as deprecated. They still work, and it is not in your best
interest to rewrite working code. But when you're creating new code, you
should reach for the best tool that exists now. This chapter shows you tech-
niques to get the most out of the .NET Framework now, in version 4.0.
Other items help you choose the best option when multiple choices are
available in the framework. Still other items explain some of the techniques
you should use if you want your classes to operate well with the classes
created by the framework designers.
Many .NET classes provide two different ways to handle events from the
system. You can attach an event handler, or you can override a
virtual
function in the
base
class. Why provide two ways of doing the same thing?
Because different situations call for different methods, that's why. Inside
derived classes, you should always override the
virtual
function. Limit
your use of the event handlers to responding to events in unrelated objects.
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