Best practices for C# GUI naming conventions? [clo

Question

GUIs, whether written in WinForms or XAML, seem to have the most widely differing naming conventions between projects I see. For a simple TextBox for a person's name, I've seen various naming conventions:

TextBox tbName      // Hungarian notation
TextBox txtName     // Alternative Hungarian
TextBox NameTextBox // Not even camelCase
TextBox nameTextBox // Field after field with TextBox on the end
TextBox TextBoxName // Suggested in an answer...
TextBox textBoxName // Suggested in an answer...
TextBox uxName      // Suggested in an answer...
TextBox name        // Deceptive since you need name.Text to get the real value
TextBox textBox1    // Default name, as bad as you can get

I abide by the StyleCop rules for all my .cs files normally, and see others do so as well, but the GUI tends to break these rules or vary wildly. I haven't seen any Microsoft guidelines that specifically refer to GUI elements instead of just normal variables, or even examples that would apply outside of a console application.

What are the best practices for naming elements in a GUI?

Answer 1

My own practice is: Type _contextDescriptionType. E.g.:

TextBox _searchValueTextBox

Anyway naming convention is either too personal or imposed by general rules. In any case it should be documented somewhere so that all project developers can easyly access.

Answer 2

You have the Guidelines for Names from Microsoft. I dot not follow everything, but it's a good starting point

Answer 3

I use Hungarian notation, that makes easy to find controlls in large pages.

Answer 4

Same convention as everything else in .NET: camel case descriptive name only, optionally followed by a suffix if you need to distinguish different classes for the same logical "thing". For example:

string name; // a name
TextBox nameText; // the control used to edit the name
Label nameLabel; // the control used to label the edit control
List<string> nameList; // a list of names

and so on ad infinitum. It really doesn't matter what the suffixes are as long as they are consistent and descriptive.

Answer 5

I tend to use c_typeName (please note that type and Name are different), e.g. c_tbUserEmail for a TextBox into which the user should type in his/her e-mail. I find it useful because when there are a lots of a controls, it can be hard to find them in the miles long intellisense list, so by adding the c_ prefix I can easily see all controls in that form.

Answer 6

If there is a good separation of concerns in an application design, I guess there will be no need for naming buttons as LoginButton, LoginBtn or btnLogin. If the owner of the object is a UI element thus let's call it Login and if the owner is not a UI element then the object is in a wrong place.