Introduction

This set of guidelines provides recommendations for developers to create high quality .NET libraries. This documentation focuses on the what and the why when building a .NET library, not the how. After each topic there are links to more information, usually to detailed documentation and references.

Recommendations

With each topic there is a list of recommendations for your OSS project using Do, Consider, Avoid and Do not. The wording of each recommendation indicates how strongly it should be followed. For example a Do recommendation is one that should almost always be followed:

✔️ DO choose an OSS license.

On the other hand Consider recommendations should generally be followed, but there are legitimate exceptions to the rule and you should not feel bad about not following the guidance:

✔️️ CONSIDER using SemVer 2.0.0 to version your NuGet package.

Do not indicates something you should almost never do:

❌ DO NOT publish strong-named and non-strong-named versions of your project, e.g. Contoso.Api and Contoso.Api.StrongNamed.

And finally less strong, avoid recommendations are something this is not a good idea, but breaking the rule sometimes makes sense:

❌ AVOID NuGet package references that demand an exact version.