Commonalities between Home Depot and .NET

In the last few weeks, I have been developing a couple tools in C#, half in Microsoft Visual Studio 2003 and the other half in Microsoft Visual Studio 2005. I maintain some of my initial reactions to C#, but I have begun to see why Kevlin Henney believes that C# is a more expressive language than Java. Take, for example, the following Java code:

1. for ( String str : list ) {
2.   System.out.println( str );
3. }

You would really have to know that this is a for-each statement or at least spending a couple seconds figuring that out the first time you see it. On the other hand, consider this C# example:

1. foreach ( string str in list ) {
2.   System.Console.WriteLine( str );
3. }

That is very obvious, and can be easily read aloud.

That said, however, this morning I read Billy Hollis’s How is the .NET Framework like Home Depot? and I couldn’t agree more. The .NET framework is not obvious when you do not know exactly what you are doing, and it can be daunting to find the answer.

I have witness this myself a couple times in the last week. For many things, you can simply Google and find enough hints to get you through the situation, but one problem I still have not solved. According to this MSDN Chat, you can implement an ActiveSync Service Provider using C# by implementing two COM interfaces, although he is unaware of anyone actually doing this, but I have not made major headway in this area after trying for a couple evenings (this is not particularly useful, BTW).

This is probably an extreme case (though you would think that C# would be a first-class citizen), but I regularly find myself knowing that I want a particular class or behaviour, but I am not sure what it is called. For example, the other day I was looking for the a map class, similar to Java's java.util.Map or C++’s std::map, and it was rather surprising to find out that this class named System.Collections.SortedList, a class that I would have assumed would have meant that the items in the list were sorted, not a list of key-value pairs, sorted by key.

One of the biggest issues with .NET is definitely the documentation. The documentation is generally brief or misleading. Some entries are simply filled with examples, such as when upgrading to 2005, the debugger will throw an InvalidOperationException if you attempt to perform an operation on a control that was created in another thread. When this occurs, it will refer you to How to: Make Cross-Thread Calls to Windows Forms Controls; the entry, however, does not describe the technique that you are employing, and the example is much longer and convoluted than it needs to be.

There are definitely some improvements in the newly released Visual Studio 2005, and while some of the things I have mentioned above will hopefully be addressed in future releases, some of them are not easily resolvable (like the Map-class), but at least they are going in the right direction.