New Styles in C#

Question

Fluent APIs are very common these days. Lately, I'm finding them in almost every system I work with. Mostly, they enhance readability but sometimes they lock me in to inflexible specifications, making understanding the runtime behavior of the specification that they build almost impossible. Is there a consensus on how to create a good fluent API? What are the best ways to represent a structure or specification using a fluent API?

I recently noticed this novel variant on the fluent API in the NServiceBus configuration class:

class EndpointConfig : IConfigureThisEndpoint, AsA_Server { }

It uses multiple interfaces as a kind of linear fluent interface. I like it because it doesn't place a heavy burden of extra code and context on me when I'm only trying to represent simple requirements. In simple cases that is adequate. I don't imagine it would scale to complex specifications, though. What do you think of this use of interfaces?

What other new idioms are you using in C#? Where do you use them? What are their strengths? Where wouldn't you use them? Also, how would you gauge the strengths of an idiom you were thinking of using?

Answer 1

I used to eschew boolean parameters on methods that indicated different behavior, e.g. I would take

int ExpensiveComputation(bool useDiskCache)

and prefer to turn it into

int ExpensiveComputation(CacheType.DiskCache)

I mostly preferred this because when you're calling ExpensiveComputation(true), it's not clear what the true means without knowing all about ExpensiveComputation, whereas ExpensiveComputation(CacheType.DiskCache) gives you a good idea.

However, with named parameters, I find it often acceptable to use the first, and call it like this: ExpensiveComputation(useDiskCache: true) So that's a recent idiom I've invented for myself.