Appendix E. C Coding Standard

Appendix E. C# 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 C# coding standard presented in this appendix is very thin on the "why" and very detailed on the "what" and the "how." I believe that while fully understanding every insight that goes into a particular programming decision may require reading books such as this 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 is based on this book, and it captures its best practices, dos and don'ts, helper classes, pitfalls, guidelines, and recommendations, as well as naming conventions and styles, project settings and structure, and framework-specific guidelines. Since I published this standard, it has become the de facto industry standard for C# and .NET development.