The general naming conventions discuss choosing the best names for the elements in your libraries. These guidelines apply to all identifiers. Later sections discuss naming specific elements such as namespaces or properties.
Do choose easily readable identifier names. For example, a property named HorizontalAlignment is more readable in English than AlignmentHorizontal.
Do favor readability over brevity. The property name CanScrollHorizontally is better than ScrollableX (an obscure reference to the X-axis).
Do not use underscores, hyphens, or any other nonalphanumeric characters.
Do not use Hungarian notation.
Hungarian notation is the practice of including a prefix in identifiers to encode some metadata about the parameter, such as the data type of the identifier.
Avoid using identifiers that conflict with keywords of widely used programming languages.
While CLS-compliant languages must provide a way to use keywords as regular words, best practices dictate that you do not force developers to know how to do this. For most programming languages, the language reference documentation contains a list of the keywords used by the languages. The following table provides links to the reference documentation for some widely used programming languages.
Abbreviations and Acronyms
In general, you should not use abbreviations or acronyms. These make your names less readable. Similarly, it is difficult to know when it is safe to assume that an acronym is widely recognized.
For capitalization rules for abbreviations, see Capitalization Conventions.
Do not use abbreviations or contractions as parts of identifier names.
For example, use OnButtonClick rather than OnBtnClick.
Do not use any acronyms that are not widely accepted, and then only when necessary.
Do use semantically interesting names rather than language-specific keywords for type names. For example, GetLength is a better name than GetInt.
Do use a generic common language runtime (CLR) type name, rather than a language-specific name, in the rare cases when an identifier has no semantic meaning beyond its type.
For example, a method that converts data to Int16 should be named ToInt16, not ToShort because Short is the language-specific type name for Int16.
The following table shows the language-specific type names for common programming languages and the CLR counterpart.
C# type name | Visual Basic type name | JScript type name | Visual C++ type name | Ilasm.exe representation | CLR type name |
|---|
sbyte | SByte | sByte | char | int8 | SByte |
byte | Byte | byte | unsigned char | unsigned int8 | Byte |
short | Short | short | short | int16 | Int16 |
ushort | UInt16 | ushort | unsigned short | unsigned int16 | UInt16 |
int | Integer | int | int | int32 | Int32 |
uint | UInt32 | uint | unsigned int | unsigned int32 | UInt32 |
long | Long | long | __int64 | int64 | Int64 |
ulong | UInt64 | ulong | unsigned __int64 | unsigned int64 | UInt64 |
float | Single | float | float | float32 | Single |
double | Double | double | double | float64 | Double |
bool | Boolean | boolean | bool | bool | Boolean |
char | Char | char | wchar_t | char | Char |
string | String | string | String | string | String |
object | Object | object | Object | object | Object |
Do use a common name, such as value or item, rather than repeating the type name, in the rare cases when an identifier has no semantic meaning and the type of the parameter is not important.
Portions Copyright 2005 Microsoft Corporation. All rights reserved.
Portions Copyright Addison-Wesley Corporation. All rights reserved.
For more information on design guidelines, see the "Framework Design Guidelines: Conventions, Idioms, and Patterns for Reusable .NET Libraries" book by Krzysztof Cwalina and Brad Abrams, published by Addison-Wesley, 2005.
Other Resources