Appendix C. WCF Coding Standard

A comprehensive coding standard is essential for a successful product delivery. The standard helps in enforcing best practices and avoiding pitfalls, and makes knowledge dissemination across the team easier. Traditionally, coding standards are thick, laborious documents, spanning hundreds of pages and detailing the rationale behind every directive. While these are still better than no standard at all, such efforts are usually indigestible by the average developer. In contrast, the WCF coding standard presented here is very thin on the "why" and very detailed on the "what." I believe that while fully understanding every insight that goes into a particular programming decision may require reading books and even years of experience, applying the standard should not. When absorbing a new developer into your team, you should be able to simply point him or her at the standard and say: "Read this first." Being able to comply with a good standard should come before fully understanding and appreciating itthat should come over time, with experience. The coding standard presented next captures dos and don'ts, pitfalls, guidelines, and recommendations. It uses the best practices and helper classes discussed in this book.