.Net Framework Design Guidelines

Designing For Extensibility

Consider	Unsealed classes with no added virtual or protected members as a great way to provide inexpensive yet much appreciated extensibility to a framework.
Consider	Using protected members for advanced customization.
Do	Treat protected members on unsealed classes as public for the purpose of security, documentation, and compatibility analysis.
Consider	Using callbacks to allow users to provide custom code to be executed by the framework.
Consider	Using events to allow users to customize the behavior of a framework without the need for understanding object-oriented design.
Do	Prefer events over plain callbacks as they are more familiar to a broader range of developers and are integrated with Visual Studio.
Avoid	Using callbacks in performance-sensitive APIs.
Do	Understand that by calling a delegate, you are executing arbitrary code and that could have security, correctness, and compatibility repercussions.
Do Not	Make members virtual unless you have a good reason to do so and you are aware of all the costs related to designing, testing, and maintaining virtual members.
Consider	Limiting extensibility to only that absolutely necessary through the use of the Template Method Pattern.
Do Not	Provide abstractions unless they are tested by developing several concrete implementations and APIs consuming the abstractions.
Do	Choose carefully between an abstract class and an interface when designing an abstraction.
Consider	Providing reference tests for concrete implementations of abstractions.
Consider	Making base classes abstract even if they don't contain any abstract members.
Consider	Placing base classes in a separate namespace from the mainline scenario types.
Avoid	Naming base classes with a “Base” suffix if the class is intended for use in public APIs.
Do Not	Seal classes without having a good reason to do so.
Do Not	Declare protected or virtual members on sealed types.
Consider	Sealing members that you override.