D
Breaking Changes
Every single change that you make in a reusable library has the potential for breaking something. If you make a method faster, you may inadvertently reveal a race condition in your caller’s code. If you make a specific case slower while making the general case faster, you might exceed the maximum time your caller allowed, or reveal a different race condition. Correcting an incorrect return value is generally good, but some callers may create a dependency—knowingly or not—on the incorrect value you returned.
This appendix touches on many different kinds of changes, the kinds of things that can be broken by changes, and whether a change is one that the .NET BCL team would generally accept for the core .NET libraries. This content ...
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