Question

With more and more projects under my belt I find that I am often repeating many common tasks from project to project, client to client. So I have started to assemble a ‘utility’ library, a collection of these common elements that are often repeated from project to project.

So far I have utilities to resize images, export data grids to excel, send e-mails, and replace tokenized messages.

If you were building/using a .NET utility class library, what types of processes would you see as helpful? What namespaces/groups would you envision?

Update

I am talking about an actual class library, separated into namespaces to group common elements.

Answer 1

1. I wouldn’t write a library called ‘Common’ or ‘Utilities’ or ‘Misc’ or… You get the idea. Instead, I’d have a directory called ‘Lib’, and have each area of functionality in a separate library under that. For example, I might have Lib/Trace, Lib/UI, Lib/Net, Lib/Web for a C++ project. For C#, I’d have Lib/Acme.Trace, Lib/Acme.Windows.Forms, Lib/Acme.Net, etc. (assuming your top-level namespace/company is called ‘Acme’).
2. YAGNI. Don’t go writing code that you might need.
3. Don’t throw things into a shared library until you’ve used them in two or more projects.