Wednesday, 27 October 2010

C# Order of items in Class structure

This useful info came from a stack overflow answer.

According to the StyleCop 4.3 Rules Documentation (available from the StyleCop 4.3 download page) the ordering is as follows.

Within a class, struct or interface: (SA1201 and SA1203)

  • Constant Fields
  • Fields
  • Constructors
  • Finalizers (Destructors)
  • Delegates
  • Events
  • Enums
  • Interfaces
  • Properties
  • Indexers
  • Methods
  • Structs
  • Classes

Within each of these groups order by access: (SA1202)

  • public
  • internal
  • protected internal
  • protected
  • private

Within each of the access groups, order by static, then non-static: (SA1204)

  • static
  • non-static

An unrolled list is 130 lines long, so I won't unroll it here. The methods part unrolled is:

  • public static methods
  • public methods
  • internal static methods
  • internal methods
  • protected internal static methods
  • protected internal methods
  • protected static methods
  • protected methods
  • private static methods
  • private methods

The documentation notes that if the prescribed order isn't suitable --- say, multiple interfaces are being implemented, and the interface methods and properties should be grouped together --- then use a partial class to group the related methods and properties together.