Question

Quite often I see source code where language’s keyword are replaced with full type names:
System.String, System.Int32, System.GUID etc.

Moreover, people who do this write complete type names everywhere, making source full of such declarations:

System.Collections.Generic.List<System.Reflection.PropertyInfo> list = System.Collections.Generic.List<System.Reflection.PropertyInfo>(newSystem.Reflection.PropertyInfo[] { ... });

When I ask them why do they do this, i get wide range of answers: “It helps me avoid type names collisions”, “It looks more professional”, “my VS plugin does it for me automatically” etc.

I understand, sometimes writing full type names helps you avoid writing unnecessary using if you use the type one time throughout the source code file. And sometimes you need to declare a type explicitly, a great example is Threading Timer and WinForms Timer.

But if you source full of DB calls and you still write System.Data.SqlClient.SqlCommand instead of ‘SqlCommand’ it looks quite a bit strange for me.

What do you think? Am i right or i just don’t understand something?

Thank you!

P.S. And another phenomena is writing if (0 != variable) instead of if (variable != 0).

Answer 1

I’d argue strongly against “it looks more professional”, as frankly it looks the opposite to me.

That said, if I was to use a single member of a namespace in the entire source file, I might use the full name there rather than have a using.

Favouring 0 != x over x != 0 etc. does have some advantages depending on overrides of equals and a few other things. This is more commonly so in some other languages, so can be a hangover from that. It’s particularly common to see people favour putting the null first, as that way it’s less likely to be turned into passing null to an equality override (again, more commonly a real issue in other languages). It can also avoid accidental assignment due to a typo, though yet again this is rarely an issue in C# (unless the type you are using is bool).