Best Practices

I have been playing around with the Enyim Memcached client for .NET over the past few days. It has a lot of really cool functionality, but one big smell that has been bugging me. Extensibility is used through the Type class, not through dependency injection. Here is the interface for the configuration object. public class MemcachedClientConfiguration : IMemcachedClientConfiguration { public MemcachedClientConfiguration(); public Type NodeLocator { get; set; } public Type KeyTransformer { get; set; } public IList<ipendpoint> Servers { get; } public ISocketPoolConfiguration SocketPool { get; } public Type Transcoder { get; set; } } Note that KeyTransformer, NodeLocator, and Transcoder are extension points for the library (really cool extension points at that). »

Every developer has heard the phrase document your code. The reason this is important is the functionality is now coupled with a description of how it works. Now a future developer can load up a single source of information and understand the functionality. But, more importantly, the odds of the documentation staying updated are higher because of this coupling. The same can’t be said for a standalone document. Well, shouldn’t the same be true for documents, specifically those that describe some sort of process? »