Has anyone thoroughly compared C# common coding standards?

Question

Most of the C# programmers I know embrace one of the common coding standards. However being aware of the standards is one thing, telling the differences is another.

Browsing the common coding standards documents our there on C#, my first reaction was it's more of the same. Admittedly I didn't bother reading everything. Has anyone ever compared them and point out the major differences between them?

• Microsoft's Design Guidelines for Developing Class Libraries

• The IDesign C# Coding Standard, development guidelines, and best practices

• Lance Hunt's C# Coding Standards

Answer 1

I did perform such a comparison, as part of my job.

I was asked to write coding style guidelines for a software engineering department. As this department was part of the military-industrial complex, the document I wrote was very detailed, and included parts of all of the documents you linked, as well as vast swaths of the Design Guidelines for Developing Class Libraries.

After I submitted my guidelines, I was asked to distill them down to 3 to 4 pages, and then to one crib sheet. In the end, the guidelines were not adopted. Instead, everyone in the department follows the rules encoded into Visual Studio.

Here is what I learned from the experience:

1. The coding style to adopt is the one your shop already uses, unless they decide to adopt a new one.
2. The guidelines for creating software libraries are already very well defined, and almost universally agreed upon by all, including the authors of the documents you linked.
3. The only real variations you are going to see in coding style that are not already universally agreed on are those variations having to do with member variables inside classes (which Microsoft has left up to the taste of individual developers).
4. The vast majority of the rules you need to know to develop a good coding style are already encoded in Visual Studio, FxCop, and other Code Analysis tools Microsoft provides.