Conventions and Standards

TL;DR; You should have a good reason not to follow conventions or standards.

This is going to be a little ranty and I apologize for it. However, I feel it needs to be said, why do developers choose not to follow common conventions or standards? With tools like Yeoman why wouldn’t you use that to generate your project so you would have a conventional project layout. Why do developers not use the default ASP .NET MVC project conventions? Why do developers choose not to follow a standards guide for the code they write? I find this frustrating to work on these projects. In the last year I have encountered .NET projects that create their own config.xml file, why not use app.config/web.config? I can overlook the custom config.xml, but why must these developers insist on writing customer parsers instead of using the built-in serialization libraries?

Now don’t take this all the wrong way. I am not trying to remove any process improvement or freedom to be creative. However, if you don’t have a good reason to not use a convention or standard then just use it. It makes maintaining the application and transitioning new developers easier.

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