.NET based class library - many ways to do a specific task - what are the top X vs Y articles and books

Answer 1

In some cases, a duplicate way of performing certain tasks is available because they further abstracted it in a subsequent version. Think about the WebClient class which I believe was introduced in .Net 2.0. It basically wraps a lot of the common tasks you used to have to do with several different classes (HttpWebRequest, HttpWebResponse, StreamReader, etc). The old classes are obviously still there if you need to do things a little differently, and for backward compatibility, but if all you need to do is download a resource from the web as a string, you've got WebClient.DownloadString.

Also, you're usually using .Net because you're not splitting hairs over cpu cycles, so the solution with the least amount of code is the preferred method if you're not concerned with performance. If you're programming a server task where no user is going to be "waiting" on a process and you need to open one file and read it into a string, go with the static method that lets you do the whole thing in one line.

Answer 2

I suppose a fairly obvious example would be string concatenation.

When concatenating just a handful of strings, you may as well just use the + operator or String.Concat. More than that and you should really consider using StringBuilder for performance reasons.

Is that the kind of thing you're thinking of?

Answer 3

If you're looking for some of the "why"s in print, you might pick up Bill Wagner's recent More Effective C#.

Answer 4

One example that took a while for me to straighten out was the different means of executing code asynchonously. There are BackgroundWorkers, Delegate.BeginInvoke/EndInvoke, and manual thread manipulation. In that case I've found that using Delegates is a good balance of ease of implementation and control; however using manual threads buys you extra control wihtout too much more work--but there is the tradeoff that creating new threads (as opposed to using the recycled ones in the threadpool) is an additional overhead.