Coding Standards for .NET

Importance of Coding Standards for .NET Development

While coding, is necessary to follows guideline or criterion of coding standard? We have a problem and we are going to write code for that. We are getting what we want then what is the need of terms like coding standard? Are they really useful? In this article we are going to find out answers of our questions…

Coding Standard…?

A coding standard is a set of guidelines, rules and regulations on how to write code which will help programmers/developer quickly read and understand source code conforming to the style as well as helping to avoid introducing faults and misunderstanding.

Coding standards are important because they provide greater consistency and uniformity in writing code between programmers. This ultimately leads to the code that is easier to understand and maintain which reduces the overall cost of the project.

Importance of Coding Standards

In the project development process, work is result of team effort, several task are distributed among team members. Often you may face situations where you transfer your work to some other person or you may need to involve in projects/tasks that ware initially developed by some other person. Majority of the people write ‘working code’, but not ‘good code’. Writing ‘good code’ is an art and you must learn and practice it.

Imagine if everyone has their own style, own coding standards and conventions then the situation become very complicated and may lead to re-design, re-coding, re- work which increase the cost of the project. Neither any company nor you will like to face such complex situation. If your code is not reliable and maintainable, you (and your company) will be spending lot of time to identify issues, trying to understand code etc.

The primary goal you have to achieve while writing code is that your code should exist long time, easy to understand and maintain by others. Most of the developers having a preference towards writing code for higher performance, compromising reliability and maintainability. It’s a reality that hardly any software is maintained for its whole life by the original author. Coding standard improve the readability of the code, allowing other to understand new code more quickly and thoroughly.

Here the term coding standard comes in focus. To develop reliable, maintainable applications and reduce development cost as well as time, you must follow coding standards.

In short advantages of coding standard are:

• Improve the readability of the code.
• Easy to understand and maintain by others.
• Separate documents appear more appropriate.
• Maintainable applications.
• Remove complexity.

Following the standards across the team

Teams are going to work on different .net technologies, different .net languages to perform various tasks. You want to apply a coding standard across the team first introduce them with importance of it and convincing everyone to follow the same standards. Take a meeting to discuss pros and cons of the points related to implementation of coding standard. Take different opinion from every peer and filter out all suggestion. Prepare a new standards document with appropriate changes based on the suggestions from all of the team members. Finally confirm all members must agree upon the standard you are going to follow.

Applying Coding Standards

Having a standards document in your possession doesn’t automatically make you a productive developer. To be successful, you must choose to become more productive, and that means you must apply these standards effectively.

Understand the standards and its importants.

Take time to understand why each standard guideline leads to greater productivity. For example, do not declare each local variable on its own line just because you are told to do so; but rather you do it because you understand that it increases the understandability of your code.

Believe in them.

Understanding each standard is a start, but you also need to believe in them too. Following standards shouldn’t be something that you do when you have the time; it should be something that you always do because you believe that this is the best way to code. Every good developer believes in following standards because in their experience intelligent standards applied appropriately lead to significant increase in their productivity as a developer.

Follow standards while you are coding, not as an afterthought.

Documented code is easier to understand while you are writing as well as after it is written. Consistently named member functions and data members are easier to work with during development and maintenance. Clean code is easier to work with during maintenance. The bottom line is that following standards will increase your productivity while you are developing as well as make your code easier to maintain.

Make them part of your quality assurance process.

Part of a code inspection should be to ensure that source code follows the standards adopted by the organization and the project team. Use standards as the basis from which you train and mentor your junior developers to become more effective.

Adopt the standards wisely and appropriately.

While most of coding standards are a culmination of the best programming practices over the years, it does not mean these are the best ways of doing something inside your code. Pick the standards within the context that you are writing your code. Also, during a project roll out adopt the standards that are most appropriate to the requirements of the applications being developed.

Reevaluate you code in free time.

After development when you have free time. Reevaluate your work, your coding styles. Check weather you miss anywhere to apply the standard. Find out loopholes and try to overcome on it in your next session of coding.

Discuss new ideas among team.

Implementation of coding standard is a team work. If you have any new idea must discuss it with team and tryout to strengthen the current standard. Because you know what you are going to code and to aware it with team, discussion is must.

Conclusion

The .NET Framework supports a wide range of functionality. And following these coding standard encourage consistency and predictability in public APIs while enabling Web and cross-language integration. It is strongly recommended that you follow these design guidelines when developing classes and components that extend the .NET Framework. Inconsistent design adversely affects developer productivity. Need to follow some of these guidelines into de facto prescriptive rules for better .net development.