Member-only story
8 Guidelines to Write Readable Code in C# With .NET 6
Improve your C# code even further with these tips
According to the Coding Guru Robert C. Martin, clean code is not too well defined, however, the results of clean code are pretty clear. You do want the code to be readable as a good book, easy to maintain, and easy to extend. Bugs should be easily spottable, or even avoided by design. A clean code will keep productivity high, and the costs of maintaining low.
One of the quotations from the book Clean Code goes like this:
“Clean code can be read, and enhanced by a developer other than its original author.” (Dave Thomas on Clean Code)
In my opinion, this is one of the most important points of clean code. If not only you can maintain a code, but also any other developer, that has an experience level close to you, a code will automatically fulfill most of the requirements of Clean Code. Of course, it may not be 100% clean, but clean enough, that the results are close to the ones mentioned above.
Readable Code
For other developers to maintain your code, it should be extremely easy to read and understand. Your goal, when writing any line of code should always be readability. Even one line could confuse another developer enough, that he might waste precious minutes understanding your code, and it is your fault!
So what makes a code more readable by other developers?
In this article, I will not focus on the methods, that are mentioned in the book Clean Code, as I can recommend checking them out by yourself. However I am focusing on specific guidelines, I learned from my experience as a .NET developer over the last 8 years.
These guidelines are supposed to make code as short and/or readable as possible. They do not replace any methods of clean coding, but they are complementary to those of Clean Code.
Guidelines for .NET and C#
Let’s not waste any more time and jump straight to the guidelines. These are the principles, my colleague Jan Donnermayer and I figured out by ourselves during the last 8 years of programming.
