Conventions and Practices to keep in mind

The last week I was preparing for a training session about programming conventions and practices to adapt some new developers who will join my team. While I am trying to acquire a good  material of my presentation I thought: there is no way to find a good material than going to the source Microsoft use in some of their products.

Here comes our man Juval Löwy. I took it's great book "Programming .NET Components" which conations nice appendix called "C# coding standers". In this part of his book he presented a summarized main standards of coding with out entering in every detail and make the reader confused.

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Coding standers is one of things every developer must keep in his mind before starting writing suck code here and their and setup a hell for the person who will try to update or make some maintenance in this f*** code.

I run in a such thing, I was involved in one of our company mature projects which supposed to be written by senior developers. The tough truth that I burned in their coding hell. Some methods with more than 500 lines of codes, hundreds of naming styles is used, thousands of uncommented methods and then you stop and stare what this piece of sh** is doing.

Without forcing developers to follow the same coding standard you will face this problem in every project event it's a simple one which contains some classes only. Every one should do coding the same way others in the team do, in spite of he some times may does not know why he should.

As Juval Löwy said :

"Being able to comply with a good standard should come before fully understanding and appreciating it, that should come over time, with experience. "

As I said first I took this part of book and make some presentation slides and categorized them in groups.Their is another tow section about "Project Setting and Project Structure", and "Framework Specific Guide-Line " I don't include in those slides.

I hope those help to keep standers in your mind while you doing your daily development work. And keeping you committed with best practices and conventions.

Happy programming

 

You can get those slides from attachments below

2 Comments

  • I remember trying to edit my own code, written in 2002, a while back. I was just starting back then. (so still a junior) It took me about 5 minutes of browsing though it before I decided it wasn't worth editing, and a fresh start was more in place.

  • The Framework Design Guidelines book is good source also. Instead of remembering all these conventions, enforce them by using FxCop (now part of VS 2008) as part of you build.

    Ali

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