A hallway talk at the Alt.NET Israel Unconference got me thinking about coding standards in general, and naming conventions in particular.

I’ve seen dozens of holy wars regarding the subject of naming conventions - when a project starts, when a new team member comes along, when the team leader is replaced etc.

I used to think that a project should have a single naming convention, and everyone should follow it. Now, I’m not so sure any more. I mean, what is really so important about naming conventions? What makes a project with a unified naming convention better than a project without one?

Unity

The first argument for naming conventions is always unity. You want all your data members to look the same.

But, think of it, what is really that important about unity? What business value do you get from it? Does it cut down development time? Does it improve performance?

IMO, if one developer wants his field to be called “_identifier”, another wants “m_identifier” and the other wants “nIdentifier”, just let them! No one ever died from Hungarian notation or a “m_” prefix, I believe.

Readability

For those who still believe in Hungarian notation (or any of its siblings), readability seems to be a great argument for naming conventions.

However, Hungarian notation might have been a good argument a decade ago. Today, all IDE’s provide great intellisense, and one could determine the type of a member in a second by hovering on it.

Scope

Determining the scope of a variable (method or class) is important, but can also be easily discovered by intellisense.

Focus on What’s Important

I’m not trying to say you shouldn’t have a naming convention in your project. I’m just trying to say, don’t let it bother you so much.

Set up a naming convention at the beginning of the project, have your team members agree on it, but don’t hunt down any exception and have it fixed.

Write a unit test or get a cup of coffee instead.

Do you think naming conventions are important? Where would you draw the line?

I’ll be heading out to the first Alt.NET conference in Israel in an hour or so, I’m really excited about the Alt.NET movement forming up in Israel.

I hope to learn some stuff I just never get around to, such as:

• Domain Driven Design,
• Behavior Driven Development,
• Domain Specific Languages.

I don’t think I’ll be able to share any knowledge, since I’m positive that I will be stunned by the high-level knowledge of the people there.

So I’m off to stare and drool. See you there!

Several months have passed since people starting using C# 3.0 out there. I, however, was busy with linear algebra, discrete math and such at that time.

I did, however, try to keep up and see what’s the fuss about extension methods, but I never got it. I mean, this is anti-encapsulation at it best - break into any type, do whatever you feel like. Total chaos.

So I gave it some time. I didn’t force it into any of my projects until the time was right. Then I finally got it - extension methods are ideal for little pieces of code which you need, but creating a utility class for them feels wrong.

For example, I was implementing a new feature for Regionerate a couple of days ago in which I had to sort a list, split it into distinct values and recursively sort it again.

Its a reflection-based sort and it has quite a bit of logic in it, so it had a class & unit tests just for it. I had to take care of the splitting thingy, but it felt wrong to add it as a method in the sort class, as it operates on lists. It really feels like a method that should run on IList<T>.

Subclassing List<T> for the job feels wrong - c’mon, how would you pitch such a class? “It’s a list that you can split!”. Unpersuasive.

That’s how I got it: If IList<T> was built especially for Regionerate, it would have had a reflection-based Split function, but since its not, I should implement it as an extension method.

Took me 2 minutes and works like a charm.

   1:  public static IDictionary<object, IList<T>> Slice<T>(

   2:          this IList<T> list, PropertyInfo propertyInfo)

   3:  {

   4:      IDictionary<object, IList<T>> slices = 

   5:          new Dictionary<object, IList<T>>();

   6:      foreach (T t in list)

   7:      {

   8:          // Get the value of propertyInfo.

   9:          object value = propertyInfo.GetValue(t, null);

  10:   

  11:          // Add it to slices.

  12:          if (slices.Keys.Contains(value))

  13:          {

  14:              // slices already has a slice for this value.

  15:              slices[value].Add(t);

  16:          }

  17:          else

  18:          {

  19:              // there is no slice for this value 

  20:              // inside slices, create a new slice.

  21:              IList<T> newSlice = new List<T>();

  22:              newSlice.Add(t);

  23:              slices.Add(value, newSlice);

  24:          }

  25:      }

  26:   

  27:      return slices;

  28:  }

A fully documented, well-aligned version of this extension method is freely available here.

It’s been a rough day for us tweeters, May 20th had a longer Twitter downtime period. The bright side is that it helped me understand how pathetic we are. See for yourself.

Note: yes, this post should have been a tweet, but I’m Twitterless.

Krzysztof Cwalina, author of the book Framework Design Guidelines: Conventions, Idioms, and Patterns for Reusable .NET Libraries has released a second revision of the Framework Design Guidelines Digest.

I’ve read Framework Design Guidelines a couple of years back and learned a whole lot from it. It definitely makes it to my top 5.

However, I’ve had problems convincing my staff members to read it, as it contains~400 pages of design tips, which are quite hard to read in succession.

The Framework Design Guidelines Digest narrows the basics down to 9 pages. I recommend everyone to download and read it every once in a while.

Quoting Krzysztof:

This document is a distillation and a simplification of the most basic guidelines described in detail in a book titled Framework Design Guidelines by Krzysztof Cwalina and Brad Abrams. Framework Design Guidelines were created in the early days of .NET Framework development. They started as a small set of naming and design conventions but have been enhanced, scrutinized, and refined to a point where they are generally considered the canonical way to design frameworks at Microsoft. They carry the experience and cumulative wisdom of thousands of developer hours over several versions of the .NET Framework.

Get it here.