c# namespace naming conventions

Question

Another developer at my company created a new class library using the following namespace:

MyCompany.Repositories.Users

Based on my experience over the years I would expect this namespace to be named as:

MyCompany.Repository.User

Which style do you normally use for your namespaces? I was thinking my style was somewhat standard. It looks cleaner to me. Can you provide any authoritative urls which recommend namespace naming conventions?

You could look at this [Namespace naming convention](https://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/ms229026(v=vs.110).aspx) — J-R Choiniere, Aug 18 '16 at 19:49
I would suggest looking to the .NET class namespaces. To keep it consistent. — Jeroen van Langen, Aug 18 '16 at 19:50
https://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/ms229026(v=vs.110).aspx "CONSIDER using plural namespace names where appropriate." I guess plural seems to be the way to go or at least an acceptable way to go — user6604655, Aug 18 '16 at 19:51
@jeroen - unfortunately I don't think there's a similar type of namespace in the .net class libs? — user6604655, Aug 18 '16 at 19:53
.NETCoreApp dll has the following namespace: Microsoft.Extensions.Options.ConfigurationExtensions so it looks like the singular/plural rule is flexible and possibly leans towards plural — user6604655, Aug 18 '16 at 19:59
Could you give some examples of classes that reside within the MyCompany.Repositories.Users namespace? — ravibhagw, Aug 18 '16 at 20:02
@rav - to be practical, let's refer to this namespace as MyCompany.Repositories which has a UserRepository class — user6604655, Aug 18 '16 at 20:04
This is also addressed in https://stackoverflow.com/questions/918894/namespace-naming-conventions where it has a more elaborate answer. — RedX, Feb 05 '18 at 16:42

score 10 · Accepted Answer · edited Apr 12 '17 at 07:31

Interesting question. I've never seen any advice beyond "use plurals where appropriate" for C#.

Let's assume that the namespace is MyCompany.Repositories

Borrowing from a similar question posed in the Java world I would suggest that plural is valid. The components that live within the Repositories namespace will be homogeneous in the sense that they are all repositories (UserRepository, StudentRepository, LocationRepository, etc).

Conversely, a namespace like MyCompany.ReportingEngine would be valid as a singularly-named namespace, as this namespace may contain heterogeneous classes that do very different things (IE a query generator class, a report model, a field model, a filtering model). MyCompany.ReportingEngines would suggest that this namespace contains different types of classes that are reporting engines.

c# namespace naming conventions

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