Formatting

Establishing some minimal style enforcement

Decision

We want to lean into existing tools to take the argument and personal tastes out of applying formatting. This helps to avoid nitpicking of PRs, especially if it happens automatically and consistently, before the PR is raised.

EditorConfig

EditorConfig. We have an .editorconfig file to control basic spacing settings. The initial rules are:

• Covers only .cs files
• Covers only basic formatting:
  • utf-8
  • Tabs, not spaces for accessibility
  • No trailing newline at end of file, simply because that's what the existing files use.
  • No trailing whitespace at end of line.
  • Newline settings, LF/CRLF not configured, as it's better to let Git settings take care of that via core.autocrlf, than to have 2 tools both changing it.

Making use of these settings

Visual Studio or JetBrains Rider apply these settings on new code automatically. Visual Studio Code has support via a plug-in.

If this is set up correctly, it should happen as you edit.

dotnet format will also follow .editorconfig rules.

Pull Request review

We do not intent to enforce formatting as part of PR review at present. It will happen automatically beforehand, or afterwards as part of a tidy-up.

Future steps

We may look into more use of these tools later, in these directions

• There are many dotnet code-style rule options that are supported by some dotnet tools.
• Cover other file types that are used in the repo. .md, .csproj and .yml are currently used.
• We may look into automate formatting or style check steps as part of a PR process.

Discussion

See the original PR for some additional context.

And see the preceding PR that prompted this decision.