The Elements of C# Style

Mitch Wheat recently posted about a wonderful little book called "The Elements of C# Style". I loved reading Strunk's "The Elements of Style" so I had to pick up a copy and read it. Mitch was spot on. This is a great little book that doesn't take long to read and provides a great summary of good C# coding style.

We have regular discussions in the blogosphere about whether or not sets of rules on coding are a good or bad thing. My own take on this is that it is critical to distill this sort of information so that newcomers to the industry have good guidance.

In this book, Kenneth Baldwin, Andrew Gray and Trevor Misfeldt have provided solid guidance for anyone writing C# code. I presume most people who read the book would do what I did and constantly think they are stating the blindingly obvious with most of their points. However, you need to think back to how you learned those things in the first place. For most of us, that was via the school of hard knocks. There was a time when many of these things would not have been obvious to you.

I also agree with Mitch that the one main error I found in the book was the recommendation to derive custom exception classes from ApplicationException instead of Exception. Brad Abrams and co now suggest *not* doing that.

Recommended!