C# (.NET) Design Flaws [closed]

Answer 1

We know so much about the right OO techniques. Decoupling, programming by contract, avoiding improper inheritance, appropriate use of exceptions, open/closed principal, Liskov substitutability, and so on. Any yet, the .Net frameworks do not employ best practices.

To me the single biggest flaw in the design of .Net is not standing on the shoulders of giants; promoting less than ideal programming paradigms to the masses of programmers that use their frameworks.

If MS paid attention to this, the software engineering world could have made great leaps in terms of quality, stability and scalability in this decade, but alas, it seems to be regressing.

Answer 2

I don't understand that you can't do

where T : new(U)

So you declare that generic type T has a non-default constructor.

edit:

I want to do this:

public class A 
{
    public A(string text) 
    {

    }
}


public class Gen<T> where T : new(string text) 
{

}

Answer 3

One thing that ticked me off in 1.x was when using the System.Xml.XmlValidatingReader, the ValidationEventHandler's ValidationEventArgs doesn't expose the underlying XmlSchemaException (marked internal) which has all the useful info like linenumber and position. Instead you're expected to parse this out of the Message string property or use reflection to dig it out. Not so good when you want to return a more sanitised error to the end user.

Answer 4

A small C# pet peev - constructors use the C++/Java syntax of having the constructor be the same name as the class.

New() or ctor() would have been much nicer.

And sure, tools such as coderush make this less of an issue for renaming classes, but from a readability POV, New() provides great clarity.

Answer 5

• null everywhere.

• const nowhere.

• APIs are inconsistent, e.g. mutating an array returns void but appending to a StringBuffer returns the same mutable StringBuffer.

• Collection interfaces are incompatible with immutable data structures, e.g. Add in System.Collections.Generic.IList<_> cannot return a result.

• No structural typing so you write System.Windows.Media.Effects.SamplingMode.Bilinear instead of just Bilinear.

• Mutable IEnumerator interface implemented by classes when it should be an immutable struct.

• Equality and comparison are a mess: you've got System.IComparable and Equals but then you've also got System.IComparable<_>, System.IEquatable, System.Collections.IComparer, System.Collections.IStructuralComparable, System.Collections.IStructuralEquatable, System.Collections.Generic.IComparer and System.Collections.Generic.IEqualityComparer.

• Tuples should be structs but structs unnecessarily inhibit tail call elimination so one of the most common and fundamental data types will allocate unnecessarily and destroy scalable parallelism.

Answer 6

Events in C#, where you have to explicit check for listeners. Wasn't that the point with events, to broadcast to whoever happen to be there? Even if there aren't any?