Question

someone wants me to make other people’s code compliant to some FxCop ruleset which includes rule CA1726:Use preferred terms. Most of the terms/replacements are all right and I can understand that one has to decide on one single way to name things.

However, what’s the deal with the term ‘flags’? Can anyone explain to me why I shall not use this name? (before I go and complain about it at my boss 😉 )

Say, I have a data object which has a member of class ‘flags’ which bundles a large number of properties that define how to handle the data object. How else would you call this?

Answer 1

In the book Framework Design Guidelines, which is what FxCop is based on, the authors say that using Flag or Flags is a bad idea. Their alternative suggestion is that when naming enumerations that you use a singular name for standard enums and a plural name for bit field (flags) enums.

For example if you wanted to create an enum listing different visibilities then you would name it Visibilities instead of VisibilityFlags or Visibility:

[Flags]
public enum Visibilities {
   Public,
   Private
}

The only items considered flags in .NET by the authors are these bitfield enumerations due to the keyword Flags attribute.