As part of the Nothin But .Net training experience, JP Boodhoo encouraged us to try out a few non-standard naming conventions that has adopted recently.
The one that intrigued me the most was his convention for naming interfaces.
Rather than taking the Microsoft sanctioned approach of adding an I prefix to all interface names, JP adopted the convention used in the Java world of reserving the unadorned name for the interfaces and instead adding an Impl suffix to the end of the concrete classes that implement the interface.
Actually, this was actually not the first time I’ve been exposed to this convention.
I have a vague recollection of Dru Sellers making a similar case for using this convention a few years ago when I worked with him. However it didn’t make nearly as much of an impression on me at that time because I wasn’t in the habit of using interfaces except when I wanted to achieve polymorphic behavior and I had already used up my base class.
Since then I started using interfaces for almost everything except entity classes. I first went down that path out of necessity because it was a requirement of Rhino.Mocks, but after I started reading about the SOLID principals and getting a better understanding of the benefits of loose coupling I adopted the approach as a de facto design guideline.
Now that interfaces play a much more central role in my code, it makes perfect sense to me that they should take precedence over concrete types when striving to create names that make my types more readable.
It also strikes me as odd that the naming standard for interfaces is clearly a vestige of the days when Hungarian notation (e.g. strName, intAge) ruled supreme. If Microsoft actively discourages the use of Hungarian notation in the case of every other type, then why should this one be any different?
When I first considered the possibility of going against the Microsoft standard, I worried about the confusion it would cause for future developers.
However, my experience in the course was that it was only confusing for the first day and then I actually grew to like it once I internalized the convention and started relying more on my color scheme of my IDE to immediately distinguish interfaces from classes.
I especially liked how the new convention served as a constant reminder of the central role that interfaces should play in my design.
Is anyone else out there using this convention?
Is it folly to swim against the stream in this regard?
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