And I Though Putting an Underscore in Front of Field Names Was a Good Idea …

My client has a bunch of coding standards that I have to follow for my project. Nothing major - most of the common sense stuff that you would see in any good coding standard. One of the standards is to attribute your assembly with CLSCompliant, like this:

[assembly: System.CLSCompliant(true)]

All fine and good, but I’m used to having an underscore (“_”) in front of my field names, like this:

public abstract class MyBaseClass
{
  protected string _myData = string.Empty;
}

The problem with this is that the underscore isn’t CLS-compliant:

"C:\somedirectory\somefile.cs(23): Identifier 'MyBaseClass._myData' is not CLS-compliant".

I’ve never run into this before as I haven’t attributed my classes with this attribute before (although I was definitely aware of it). This kind of stinks because I liked being able to type “_” and then do a Ctrl+space key combo in VS .NET to make it easier to get the right field name in my code. Oh, well, life could be worse. I could be coding in VB .NET (just adding fuel to all the recent flame wars over languages!)

Published: 07.14.2004 10:41:51 PM CST

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Jason Bock

And I Though Putting an Underscore in Front of Field Names Was a Good Idea …