Framework Design Guidelines: Conventions, Idioms, and Patterns for Reusable .NET Libraries

Appendix A. C# Coding Style Conventions

UNLIKE THE FRAMEWORK DESIGN GUIDELINES, these coding style conventions are not required and should be treated as a set of suggestions. The reason we don’t insist on following these coding conventions is that they have no direct effect on the end user of the framework.

There are many coding style conventions, each with own history and philosophy. The conventions described here have the following goals:

1. The conventions must be something real developers use. To accomplish this goal, we reviewed sources written by the .NET Framework developers and rejected any conventions that were proposed but are not used widely in code contributing to the Framework.

2. The conventions are optimized for brevity, within reason. We ...