Last night I presented to the Perth .Net Community on an upcoming tool called PEX. There were a couple of mentions in the talk of “allowable exceptions” backed up by mentions of the .Net Framework Guidelines.
I was asked by a few people afterward what the book was and whether I had presumably made these guidelines up 😉
I was under the impression that this book was widely read, so it is clearly not as common knowledge as i may have thought.
Framework Design Guidelines: Conventions, Idioms, and Patterns for Reusable .NET Libraries (2nd Edition)
is a must read for .Net devs that are writing code that is consumable by others (ie anything that uses public or protected accessors)

I would highly recommend this as it also gives a lot of background as to “why” behind the recommendations. It is also nice to read the comment from authors of certain .Net framework as they point out many things including their mistakes.

The books is made available online for free (not sure if it is in its entirety) at MSDN here

The allowable exception was in reference to section 7.3.5 (page 237) or a cut down version here

Oh, the links to the Pex stuff are here:

• Pex or here
• Community Extensions
• Stubs framework
• Spec# (Pronounced “Speck Sharp”)
• Code Contracts

Thanks to everyone who came (especially those who bought beers afterwards) 😉