I actually phrased that badly; what I meant was that I wanted to add to your response instead of responding directly to Ennis Ray. Thanks for the kinds words and I hope you find work!

As the primary author of the guide, I'll respond to your message instead of the initial troll. I found "special circle of hell for the bigots" to be a bit over the top for a style guide we published free to the community. Take or leave what you like from the guide; it's only text and can't force you to do anything. It's up to an individual organization to determine how they want to enforce a coding style, if at all. We found that having a common coding style improved our code overall; YMMV. We don't, however, enforce it in all cases. The handbook has been much more useful as a place to look for guidance when you don't have a personal opinion on how something should be formatted (e.g. larger case statements or wrapping for long methods). As the document itself states in the first few paragraphs, we were constantly updating it as we went along until we had something that reflected the input of all interested parties. We're still open to suggestions.

Encodo is a small software consulting company in Switzerland. We published our handbook because it helped us a lot and we figured we could share it with the community. You're free to take or leave whatever you like from it and we welcome any suggestions you might have. We're still waiting on an official MS endorsement. ;-)

modified on Monday, December 1, 2008 2:38 AM

There is an extension of C# available that provides some help in this area: spec#. I haven't used it myself, but I'm a big fan of Eiffel, which has deep design-by-contract support. Spec# includes notation to indicate that a variable or parameter can never be null. BTW, if you're really interested in further reading on features for C#, the Eiffel language is a good place to start, as a language that has true generics since inception as well as tuples, anchored types, parameter covariance and many other interesting goodies.