Question

If I am accessing a member field, property, or method, I’m never sure when I should prepend it with ‘this’.

I am not asking about cases where it is required, like in the case where a local variable has the same name. I am talking about cases where the meaning is exactly the same. Which is more readable? Are there any standards, best practices, or rules of thumb I should be following? Should it just be consistent throughout a class, or an entire code base?

Answer 1

I recommend using Microsoft’s guidelines, as verified by StyleCop: http://blogs.msdn.com/sourceanalysis/

The general rule is, prepend members with “this.” when they are defined in the class, unless they are static, in which case you cannot.

Here is the rule directly from StyleCop:

SA1101: The call to {method or property name} must begin with the
'this.' prefix to indicate that the item is a member of the class.