While I was writing my last series (User Group Startup Stories I noticed that the series idea helped to focus my attention, consolidate my ideas and forced me to put the digital pen to the digital paper. In light of this I’m going to start another series on a very contensious topic….naming conventions. I understand that people are very passionate, somewhat belligerent and quite opinionated about their favourite naming convention. Rather than trying to preach as an expert, I’m going to pick areas in code where naming conventions are used and I’m going to try to discuss a number of options complete with the pros and cons as I see them. After presenting these ideas I will post my personal preference and an explanation of why I choose it.
I’m going to gather the information in these posts from a couple of different sources. In addition to my own opinions and experiences I’m going to references the following two books. These are great tomes and I recommend them for purchase.
- Practical Guidelines and Best Practices for Microsoft Visual Basic and Visual C# Developers by Francesco Balena and Giuseppe Dimauro
- Framework Design Guidelines by Krzysztof Cwalina and Brad AbramsHere’s a list of what I intend to discuss in the series.
- Consistency Through Convention
- Local Variables
- Module Variables
- Functions, Methods and Parameters
- Properties
- Classes
- Interfaces and Super (Base) Classes
- UI Controls
- SQL Server Objects
Hungarian and Other Notations– Covered in the other postsI’ll admit that right now I’m a little nervous about doing this series. People are going to take my ideas and opinions and kick them around like angry footballers striking a ball. Remember one thing. In the end it’s not about right and wrong, good or bad, old school or new age. Naming conventions are about consistency and readability through adherence to standardized policy.