Coding Style

General standards: tour of C#

Our coding style generally follows the Microsoft guidelines:

https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/dotnet/csharp/tour-of-csharp/

https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/dotnet/csharp/tour-of-csharp/classes-and-objects

https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/dotnet/csharp/tour-of-csharp/types-and-variables

Although, to attain a higher level of clarity and transparency, we also follow some additional rules and style guidelines.

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Filenames, objects and methods

• A .cs file can contain only 1 (one) class, and there is no concept as a Helper or Utils class.
• The name of the .cs file is the Name (excluding the namespace) of the class, e.g. the Line class is in the Line.cs file
• For methods, a file can only contain methods whose name is the same as their file, e.g. Flip(Line line) and Flip(Arc arc) are in the same file Flip.cs. As a corollary, RandomFlip cannot lie in the Flip.cs file, and must have a RandomFlip.cs file by its own.

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Folders and namespaces

Namespaces and the folder structure that contains the .cs files have a close relationship. To define the correct folder structure helps keeping the relationship with the namespaces. This, in turn enables additional functionalities, such as deriving the web address of the source code of a method.

For a class, an Attribute, and Enum, an Interface, the folder structure respects the following rules:

• If a file is in a sub folder, the namespace of the entity must follow: if Bar is in a sub folder Elements, its namespace must suffix the Elements word BH.oM.Structure.Elements.

• An Enum must be in a separate folder Enums. Although, the namespace remains unchanged, and does not follow - i.e. Enums is appended as suffix. For example BarFEAType is in the sub folder Elements, and it is an enum. Its namespace respects A., so it contains the Elements word, but does not contain the Enum word: BH.oM.Structure.Elements. At the same time, since it is an Enum it is in an Enums folder.

• The same rule as B. applies to:

  • Attribute => Attributes
  • Interface => Interfaces

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Enum ordering

The order an Enum is written is the order in which it is displayed in the UI dropdown options. This order is therefore important to the UX of using the Enum within a workflow. The order should therefore follow one of the following conventions. There may be occasions when an Enum order does not follow the conventions below. These occasions should be clearly documented with the reasons why a different convention has been followed.

Alphabetical

The order of the Enum should be alphabetical (following British-English spelling conventions) in ascending order (i.e. A-z).

Caveat for Undefined

If your Enum option has an Undefined option to denote a default unset option, then this should go as the first option at the top of the Enum.

For an example of an Enum following this convention, see the Environment Panel Type Enum.

Logical

The order of the Enum can be in a logical order instead where this makes more sense than alphabetical. An example of such an Enum might be one that records the size of an object. In this case, the options might be:

ExtraSmall
Small
Normal
Large
ExtraLarge

This order for the Enum makes logical sense and provides a good UX where users will have context from the name of the Enum that the order might be different to alphabetical (e.g. the name might be UnitSize).