A checklist of guidelines and best practices by Francesco Balena (.Net2TheMax Team) - Code Architects Srl       A 30-page Word document with a summary of 700+ best practices you can use to create bullet-proof .NET applications You must be registered to download this file. If you already have an account, please login.  Printer friendly version

This list of over 700 guidelines is excerpted from the textbook Practical Guidelines and Best Practices for Microsoft Visual Basic .NET and Visual C# Developers, by Francesco Balena and Giuseppe Dimauro (2005, Microsoft Press) and is meant to be used together with the book. All the examples on applying these guidelines are provided in the book, together with a thorough description of each rule and its benefits as well as cases where the rule isn't recommended and shouldn't be used. The list covers virtually any topic related to Visual Basic, C#, and .NET programming, including optimization, database access, Windows Forms and ASP.NET, remoting, COM+, security, and so forth.

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."

You can also download the book's source code.

Browse readers' reviews and buy from Amazon at 40% off.

This checklist is provided as a Word document to enable you to modify it as you wish, for example by dropping the sections or the individual guidelines that don't apply to the kind of applications you're developing or that don't fit your coding style. You should create a customized version of this checklist, print it, and use it during the design phase as well as code reviews.

While we encourage you to create a custom version of this list, we ask that (1) you make neither the original nor any customized version of this checklist available outside your company or organization by any means, including Web and FTP sites, and (2) you always keep this introductory text and logo at the top of this document, so that readers can track the origin of the guideline list. We truly hope that this list will be helpful in improving your coding process.

Francesco Balena - Code Architects Srl