Question

Can anyone point me to a site, or give me some wisdom on how you go about choosing names for interfaces, classes and perhaps even methods and properties relating to what that object or method does?

This is specifically for Microsoft development, so Java-esque ‘doGet’ and so on isn’t really used, however some general rules that cross language barriers must (I would’ve thought) exist.

An example might help: I have 4 choices of names for an interface:

IGroupedItem IGroupableItem IDataEntity IGroupedEntity 

They all contain an adjective and the noun, or just a noun. Looking at the .NET framework it seems like there must be some kind of ruleset for this, for consistency? Aside from the obvious verbs for methods.

Edit: Though the example is an interface, I’m not limiting this to just interfaces. The general guideline is classes are nouns, methods verbs, properties nouns. I suppose what I mean is choice of the synonym. Is throwing ‘Entity’ everywhere wrong

Answer 1

Look at the MSDN articles for naming guidelines. In short:

• Use nouns for class names and property names (it’s obvious)
• For interface names, start with I and use nouns and/or adjectives to describe behavior
• Use verbs for method names to describe action

For your example – IGroupableItem.