Thursday, 2 October 2008

I Wish the Framework Team Used Interfaces More

One of the things that often bugs me about the .NET Framework is that so many of the classes are written without an interface. A case in point is the System.Net.Mail.SmtpClient class. This is an excellent class and very useful. It extends System.Object, but it does not implement an interface. This is extremely frustrating!

It's not that I would like to write my own version and swap it in, but I would like to be able to Mock it nicely and follow that development 101 practice of coding to the Interface. Not having an interface is very limiting, what if I want to use a Decorator pattern to implement logging (yes I know that it does some of this internally) or authorisation, no chance!

How hard would it have been to write it to an interface? It takes me no more than a couple of clicks and movements of the mouse.

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