Wed, June 4, 2003
Maybe you’re getting tired of my posting my “firsts”
at MS, but that’s the beauty of this medium. I get to say what I feel like and
you get to listen or not, as you choose. Mostly this “Dear Diary” format helps
me to digest the world around me. Many times, the writing itself has helped me
to clear my head. If you haven’t tried it yourself, I recommend it.
So, on
with my next “first.” Today I crashed an API review. I happen to be on a few
internal Longhorn mailing lists and recently got an announcement of a new API
that was going up for its first review. I didn’t know what to expect, but I
hoped at least to see some familiar faces and to introduce myself around.
Now, the way I work things, I try to really pack myself into meetings when I’m
up in Redmond so that I can get the most out of my time away from home (I’m
still based in Portland, OR). In this case, I had a meeting scheduled from 9am
to 10am in building 5 and then had to truck across campus to building 42 for the
API review at 10am. Needless to say, I was late (the only thing harder than
finding parking in the sea of cars after 9am is finding your anonymous rental
car when you come back for it). Luckily, MS meetings seem to start late as a
matter of course, so I hadn’t missed anything. However, I was a bit surprised
that in more than a month of introducing myself around, there was a room full of
10+ people and no familiar faces. They glanced up at me when I came in the door
and seemed a bit confused as to who I was, but didn’t ask or toss me out on my
butt (it’s handy being 6′5″ sometimes : ).
The process was pretty cool.
Apparently the team building the API had answered a standard questionnaire from
the review team, which included target users, potential security problems and
representative sample code that users would be expected to construct. The review
team had prepared by going over the questionnaire and prepared topics of
discussion (the latter making this review process better than most I’d
attended). The API team provided answers to the questions and took notes on how
to fix their API.
I was impressed with the whole thing. The API team was
very open to suggestions for improvement, even letting me put in my two cents (I
couldn’t help myself : ). And the design team gave out just the kind of advice I
want all .NET APIs to follow, e.g. use best practice coding conventions in
sample code, support IDisposable at a macro level instead of a micro level,
expose collections from properties returning IEnumerable (not from the parent
object itself), prefer properties over Get/Set methods (as appropriate), don’t
tack the name of the enumeration type onto the enumeration values themselves,
prefer overloads to parameters that can be null, prefer typed parameters to
object parameters, etc. In addition, where the API team had reinvented the wheel
(they were experts in their problem domain, not the entire .NET Framework Class
Library, after all), the review team pointed them at what to emulate and where
to look for more guidance. The whole process gave me quite a bit of confidence
in .NET maintaining the high degree of consistency that’s it’s achieved to date
(the FCL consistency is not perfect, I admit, but it’s a damn sight better than
COM APIs ever were and don’t even get me started on Win32).
After all
that, I did finally get to introduce myself (the note taker on the API team
wanted to know who was complaining : ), I helped name a Longhorn data structure
and I met a General PM that I needed to talk to anyway, so it was a useful
experience all around.
