My C# Naming Conventions For Partial Class Files
Following up on a previous post, this time I'll give you my naming conventions for partial class files.
There are two main reasons for me to break a class definition into more than one file. The main one is when I have inner classes and the other is when the file is getting too big.
How should I name the files? The usual tendency is to use a “.” as separator. This looks nice until you came across something like this:
public class MyComponent
{
private class Activation
{
// Class implementation.
}
private class Deployment
{
// Class implementation.
}
#region Event Handling
// Event handling code.
#endregion
}
If I would extract the inner classes and use the “.” as separator, I would end up with the following list of files:
- MyComponent.Activation.cs
- MyComponent.cs
- MyComponent.Deployment.cs
And, what about the long event handling code? Should I do the same? If so, I will end up with the following list of files:
- MyComponent.Activation.cs
- MyComponent.cs
- MyComponent.Deployment.cs
- MyComponent.EventHandling.cs
This doesn’t look very nice, does it?
So, here is my proposal:
- “-“ separator for code from the top class
- “+” separator for inner classes
This way, I end up with the following list of files:
- MyComponent.cs
- MyComponent-EventHandling.cs
- MyComponent+Activation.cs
- MyComponent+Deployment.cs
And this looks a lot nicer.