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Comment by icey | Hacker News Reader

Well, if you're not idiomatic with C# yet, that would be the very first place I'd start (by that I mean you know why you'd use StringBuilder vs. string concatenation, etc).

After that, make sure you're good about commenting code that isn't immediately obvious.

From that point, I'm afraid we'd probably need some samples to see where you might be going wrong or right.

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I definately know some of the inner workings of.Net, such as using StringBuilder compared to string concatenation. Some of the things I need to know is what is an acceptible name for a variable based on its scope. For instance currently to describe a private variable belonging to a class I will prefix it with an underscore. Is there a universal way of denoting varibles by scope?

I don't think there's a universal way, but what I usually do is:

- For private class fields, I use an underscore with camelcase, starting with a lowercase letter, e.g.:

private static int _id = 12345;

- For public class fields, properties, methods, etc. I use camelcase, starting with an uppercase letter, e.g.:

public double Determinant() ...

- For method parameters, I use camelcase, starting with a lowercase letter, e.g.:

public void Foo(int bar, ref string helloThere)

I think this is also the style that Microsoft uses internally, and it makes it easy to see where your variables came from.

I'd try taking a look at "IDesign C# Coding Standard, for development guidelines and best practices" from here:

http://idesign.net/idesign/DesktopDefault.aspx

(This is the direct download link: http://idesign.net/idesign/download/IDesign%20CSharp%20Codin...)

This is an excellent article. I follow alot of the guidlines already but there is some important ones that I am missing. Thank you.

I would second this - it has a lot of good info for C# folks.

The standard (citing from memory) is to use Properties in uppercase (PascalCase) and fields in lowercase (camelCase) with NO prefix whatsoever but preceed them with "this." whenever referenced. parameters are also lowercase (camelCase) with NO prefix whatsoever and are thus difference of local variables by the absence of the "this.". However, this doesn't answer the static fields and Properties...

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