Arno# - The cutting edge of developer waffle

Brad Abrams has published details of the number of classes, members, namespaces and assemblies in the various .NET frameworks. The latest offering, .NET 3.5, has 98 assemblies, containing 309 namespaces. Those namespaces in turn contain 11,417 classes, which define 109657 members. He doesn’t say whether this is total, or whether these are just the public classes and members. Hopefully it is the former.

Brad claims that “in each release [Microsoft] are adding new functionality that make it easier to build .NET applications”. Is this true though? One could argue that as the number of classes goes up, so it becomes more difficult to find the class you need to solve a particular problem. Take XML as a case in point. There are 48 classes in the XML namespace, including confusing sets that appear to have the same, or very similar functionality. For example, XmlWriter, XmlDictionaryWriter and XmlTextWriter.

Perhaps rather than speculating on how much the .NET 4 framework might grow by, Brad and his colleagues could try making heavy use of the System.Obsolete class to reduce the numbers. Now that really would make it easier to build .NET applications.