Naming Conventions & Coding Standards for .NET

Being a middle-tier guy, as well as being anal about standards & conventions, I really wanted to expand on my standards documents authored for clients, and write a verbose standards document to share with the community.  Since then, I’ve realized a few things.  First, a good friend of mine convinced me that quick, bullet-list, to-the-point documents are used more readily than verbose 100+ page guidelines.  So far in my experience with clients & consultants, I've found that to be the case.  Second, many people have put together some great work in this area!  Check out the work that these people/teams have put together on this topic:

Naming Conventions/Coding Standard Guidance for .NET & C#

·         Microsoft’s Design Guidelines for Class Library Developers (via MSDN Library)

·         Lance Hunt’s C# Coding Standards document

·         Juval Lowy & IDesign.net’s C# Coding Standards document  (Click on the red "Standard" box located on the right side of the window to download the document.)

·         Microsoft’s new .NET Framework Developer Center, with related presentations & chat transcripts on various topics.

I think many companies/consulting shops take the best from these documents, and adopt their own standard.

I’m curious what the community thinks of standards documents…

·         Do you like concise bullet list documents or verbose papers?  

·         Or do you ditch all of these, and rather rely on tools such as FxCop? 

·         Do you have other guidelines, not listed here that you think are worth mentioning?

·        Prefer VB.NET’er?  Have some good links to VB.NET standards documents?  Share them here, I’ll keep a running list.

Please send your feedback!

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