How-To

I recently finished my first "real" Windows Forms app in .NET 2.0, and when I finally got to a "complete" working version I was ready to do some cleanup and refactoring. So, I began combing through my code, reading for things I wasn't completely satisfied with. After correcting a few "magic numbers" type issues, it so happened that Brian came by my desk. Brian is a younger colleague here, really sharp guy, great attitude--one of the ones who "gets it". And he points out that I'm using "old school" Collection classes, when I could be using Generics.

After six years of experience in programming in an Object Oriented language, I've identified five different types of classes that occur in OO programming. Knowing and understanding the distinction and knowing how to build each of these types of classes is, I think, essential to writing decent code that is easy to read, understand, debug, and maintain.