There are so many times that I see little gremlins hopping around in code and this is just me venting about it.

Naming Conventions

There have been numerous posts, articles and tweets about naming conventions and this is just my rant about this very topic.

Why use naming conventions?

The answer is pretty simple, chaos will ensue and little gremlins will run around your code, because no developer will be able to quickly glance at the code and understand what is happening because names like “Rdr” and “obj” (which, by the way is my favourite) just doesn’t describe what the variable is supposed to be used for. Furthermore, if you have no standard, you don’t know whether or not the variable is a parameter, member variable or property of the class.

Do you see what I’m getting at?

Naming convention reduces the time for a developer to look, understand and use the code. Naming conventions on MSDN

Consider the following lines of code

public class cPerson { private int iAge; private string sName; }
public class Person { private int age; private string name; }

You should be able to infer the type from the name of a member of a class. Age is an integer, it’s definitely not a double, nor is it a string.

You should not need to prepend the member with the first letter of the type. The type should be inferred. Instance naming This is where I just go absolutely mental. Take a look at the following code. Mixed up in a 400 line method where you have to first figure out what type the variable is because its name doesn’t describe it completely.

SqlConnection con = new SqlConnection();
SqlConnection northwindConnection = new SqlConnection();

Conclusion
I believe that it’s so important that as a developer, you should standardize your naming conventions as long as it’s readable, understandable and logical.