Design Guidelines for .NET development is something very close and dear to me. Partially for my own sake, but mostly to have consistency across a company, between friends and maybe even across blog-examples.
The tool StyleCop is Microsoft's tool for enforcing these guidelines.
StyleCop analyzes C# source code to enforce a set of style and consistency rules. It can be run from inside of Visual Studio or integrated into an MSBuild project.
After asking a question Visual Studio C#-settings and StyleCop (MS Source Analysis) on Stackoverflow I set out to try to get C# in Visual Studio to behave as compliant as possible.
The result after some testing around was this Visual Studio settings file. You can easily import these settings to your own Visual Studio.
It's mainly about placements of parentheses and curly-braces.
Yes, it can be a bit of a hassle to get used to having the curly-braces on the same line as the namespace-declaration, the class-declaration and method-declaration, but it saves some space and I got used to it quiet quickly and now have problems going back.
namespace TestApp {
public class TestObject {
static TestObject() {
if(true) {
DoSomething();
DoSomething2();
} else {
DoSomethingElse()
}
}
}
}
This is as close as I can get to the conventions. It's worth to note that StyleCop can differ a bit from the book Framework Design Guidelines: Conventions, Idioms, and Patterns for Reusable .NET Libraries .