Coding Standards and Design Guidelines

I get a lot of people at work asking me about our coding standards and guidelines. We do have some, but to be perfectly honest, they could be better.

I like to utilize the Code Analysis feature of the Visual Studio version I am running, and let the compiler help with warnings and errors when rules are broken. Unfortunately this is not available with all versions.

I also found two very useful articles on MSDN that help a lot with defining standards:

• Reviewing Managed Code
• Design Guidelines for Developing Class Libraries