Performance Consulting: A Practical Guide for HR and Learning Professionals

In this chapter we've looked at two sides of programming in the .NET environment. We spent the bulk of the chapter examining the tools that Microsoft has supplied to make your work writing C# (and C++ and VB.NET) code as easy as possible - particularly Visual Studio .NET. Then we finished off by examining some of the conventions you should try to follow when writing C# code. I quite like to think of the situation in terms of rights and responsibilities (by analogy with certain political debates): with .NET, you get the benefit of some really great tools that will have a huge impact on the speed with which you can get software written and debugged , but on the other hand you have the responsibility to use these tools carefully  - by writing code that will be easy for others to use or maintain, and you can best show that responsibility by following the guidelines for writing good code.

In short, we have covered the following areas in this chapter:

• The look of Visual Studio .NET and some of the more common windows and tools that you will use when coding in the IDE

• WinCV - a useful utility that allows you to examine the base classes

• Usage guidelines and naming conventions - the guidelines that you should adhere to when writing C# code, so that your code follows normal .NET practice, and can be easily understood by others.