Commercial support for the C# 3.0/4.0 Coding Guidelines

A few weeks ago I had a chat with Paul Jansen, CEO of a small Eindhoven-based company named Tiobe. You might indirectly know Tiobe for its programming language index and their commercial code checker ClockSharp. But they have also been hosting a C# Coding Standard I co-wrote for Philips Medical Systems for over seven years. He mentioned that it is still downloaded 4000-5000 times per month. However, he recently received some remarks that the current standard is rather outdated and was pointed at my efforts at www.csharpcodingguidelines.com.

He explained me their ideas to redesign their commercial code checker using parts of StyleCop and to support as many guidelines as possible from my own coding guidelines. Since we have been trying to do something similar using FxCop and StyleCop, and we know how difficult that is, I'm quite happy with that. In addition to that they'll start hosting my guidelines on their side, hopefully increasing its visibility. The only thing I need to do is to maintain the document, which I'm already doing, so that's no big deal.

Because most of their clients are in the technical automation or embedded systems profession, one thing we still need to figure out is how to deal with their desire to re-add some guidelines that I removed to keep the document compact. Maybe I'll maintain two versions of the document, one light version on www.csharpcodingguidelines.com and one more complete version on www.tiobe.com.