Why Microsoft Developers Need a Style Guide

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Why Microsoft Developers Need a Style Guide

Posted by timothy on Sunday February 12, 2012 @10:30AM from the offense-is-the-worst-thing-in-the-world dept.

snydeq writes "What your interface communicates to users can be just as important as what your software does, writes Fatal Exception's Neil McAllister in discussing the latest edition of the 'Microsoft Manual of Style', a style guide aimed at designers and developers who create Microsoft software, as well as those who write about it. 'The gist of much of Microsoft's advice is that a user's relationship with computer software is a unique one, and it's important to craft the language of software UIs accordingly,' McAllister writes. 'Occasionally, Microsoft's recommendations verge on the absurd. For example, you might not think it necessary to admonish developers to "not use slang that may be considered profane or derogatory, such as 'pimp' or 'bitch,'" but apparently it is.'"

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I have an idea for the style guide by Anonymous Coward · 2012-02-12 10:36 · Score: 5, Insightful

How about, when naming variables, you have to put the first letter of the typename in the start of the variable name!
And then later let's change the types in the API but keep the unmatching old names for compatibility!
1. Re:I have an idea for the style guide by maxwell+demon · 2012-02-12 11:23 · Score: 5, Insightful
  
  How about, when naming variables, you have to put the first letter of the typename in the start of the variable name!
  Hungarian notation isn't about using the typename at all.
  Please tell that to Microsoft.
  
  --
  The Tao of math: The numbers you can count are not the real numbers.
2. Re:I have an idea for the style guide by NevarMore · 2012-02-12 14:50 · Score: 5, Insightful
  
  I was (am?) the generation who learned to code in the mid-90s. I hate to sound lazy, but once we got over that hungarian nonsense, every team I've worked on just agreed (or had dictated) an autoformatter for our IDE and just made sure to run it before we committed. Hell one team had it setup as a pre-commit hook in SVN. It mooted many of the style arguments and let us focus on solving real problems.
  Hell the more modern IDEs like Eclipse, IntelliJ, and VisualStudio even suggest variable names and hint for proper case. As programmers and software engineers should we not use software tools to do tedious and mundane work for us?
Re:Bad title by gbjbaanb · 2012-02-12 11:18 · Score: 5, Insightful

It's the best way to encourage consistency across applications and the accompanying documentation. Does that not happen anymore?
no, it doesn't happen anymore. The original style guide was good - it said how much space to leave around the edges of dialogs, how big to make buttons and where to put the ok/cancel buttons. the end result was an overall look and feel that made sense no matter which application you used, and that meant TCO was reduced as users knew how to use it.
Fast forward to the XAML/WPF/C# era and all that went out the window in favour of "rich" UIs where you have a stupid coloured orb that everyone thinks is decoration until you realise it's the main system menu, and every application has a different set of awful skins.
I would hope (haven't read it) that this redresses the balance.
Re:Nobody is happy by 19thNervousBreakdown · 2012-02-13 02:11 · Score: 5, Insightful

Because that way there's only one success, and many failures.
0(false) = success 1(true) = failure 2(true) = different failure 3(true) = yet another failure

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