1      Overview.......................................................................................................................... 1

1.1      Principles & Themes................................................................................................. 1

1.2      Terminology................................................................................................................ 1

2      General Coding Standards........................................................................................ 3

2.1      Clarity and Consistency........................................................................................... 3

2.2      Formatting and Style................................................................................................ 3

2.3      Using Libraries........................................................................................................... 5

2.4      Global Variables........................................................................................................ 5

2.5      Variable Declarations and Initalizations............................................................. 5

2.6      Function Declarations and Calls............................................................................ 6

2.7      Statements................................................................................................................... 8

2.8      Enums............................................................................................................................ 8

2.9      Whitespace................................................................................................................ 13

2.10   Braces........................................................................................................................... 14

2.11   Comments................................................................................................................... 15

2.12   Regions........................................................................................................................ 23

3      C++ Coding Standards............................................................................................ 25

3.1      Compiler Options................................................................................................... 25

3.2      Files and Structure.................................................................................................. 26

3.3      Naming Conventions............................................................................................. 27

3.4      Pointers...................................................................................................................... 30

3.5      Constants................................................................................................................... 31

3.6      Casting....................................................................................................................... 32

3.7      Sizeof.......................................................................................................................... 32

3.8      Strings........................................................................................................................ 33

3.9      Arrays......................................................................................................................... 34

3.10   Macros........................................................................................................................ 35

3.11   Functions..................................................................................................................... 35

3.12   Structures................................................................................................................... 38

3.13   Classes........................................................................................................................ 38

3.14   COM............................................................................................................................ 44

3.15   Allocations.................................................................................................................. 45

3.16   Errors and Exceptions............................................................................................. 46

3.17   Resource Cleanup..................................................................................................... 48

3.18   Control Flow................................................................................................................ 50

4      .NET Coding Standards............................................................................................. 54

4.1      Design Guidelines for Developing Class Libraries........................................ 54

4.2      Files and Structure................................................................................................... 54

4.3      Assembly Properties............................................................................................... 54

4.4      Naming Convensions............................................................................................. 54

4.5      Constants................................................................................................................... 57

4.6      Strings......................................................................................................................... 58

4.7      Arrays and Collections........................................................................................... 59

4.8      Structures.................................................................................................................... 61

4.9      Classes......................................................................................................................... 62

4.10   Namespaces................................................................................................................ 65

4.11   Errors and Exceptions.............................................................................................. 65

4.12   Resource Cleanup...................................................................................................... 68

4.13   Interop........................................................................................................................... 80

Each chapter in this document has to acknowledge Dan Ruder, a Principal Escalation Engineer of Microsoft. Dan carefully reviewed every word, and contributed review comments on significant portions of the book based on his more than 20 years’ programming experience. Working with the nice man has been a special treat to me.

I also thank four managers at Microsoft for continuously supporting and sponsoring the work: Vivian Luo, Allen Ding, Felix Wu and Mei Liang.

This document wouldn’t contain the depth of technical details or the level of completeness it has without the input of the following people

Alexei Levenkov , Hongye Sun, Jie Wang, Ji Zhou, Michael Sun, Kira Qian, Allen Chen, Yi-Lun Luo, Steven Cheng, Wen-Jun Zhang, Linda Liu

Some chapters derive from several Microsoft product teams’ coding standards. I appreciate their sharing.

The coding standards are continuously evolving. If you discover a new best practice or a topic that is not covered, please bring that to the attention of the All-In-One Code Framework Project Group (onecode@microsoft.com). I look forward to appreciating your contributions.  :-)